Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

In 1991, Wendy Assinder described a classroom experiment she had carried out in which her students prepared their own classroom materials and then taught them to each other. She subsequently reported on the positive effects of this approach on their language learning, and on their attitudes towards learning. Inspired by her findings, and those of others, two university language teachers conducted a similar classroom experiment, in which students actively participated in developing and delivering learning materials for an ESP course in legal English. This article describes how the course was conducted, and the results of the course evaluation, to which the students and teachers both contributed. It then discusses the results, which were much less positive than Assinder's, Attempting to see why this might have been the case, and making recommendations for future uses of the approach.

The new technologies of recent decades have brought about changes in how computers are used to assist language teaching. E-mail, computer conferencing, and now the World-Wide Web (WWW), have been increasingly used to enhance language teaching and to facilitate teacher development. With three examples drawn from e-mail and computer conferencing projects in Europe, America and Asia that involve English teachers and college students, this paper attempts to explore why and how computer-enhanced ESL/EFL projects have been extended to the WWW. Moving to the WWW has expanded the scope of the potential audience and made possible the inclusion of multimedia and hyperlinked materials in these projects. It is important to control the right of access and to monitor the quality of students' work, without losing sight of the language focus or sacrificing the human touch in language classes. 近年來，科技日新月異，如何使用電腦輔助語言教學，也引起了廣泛的討論。在加強語言教學及促進老師培訓方面，電子郵件、電腦會議及現今流行的萬維網的應用，日益增加。本文嘗試利用三個來自歐、亞、美洲的電子郵件及電腦會議計劃的例子，探討為何及如何將電腦輔助的英語教學計劃，延申至萬維網上。使用萬維網教學的好處是增加使用者，同時也可引用多媒體及超連結的教材，但在控制上網權及監察學生作品質素，以至語文學習重點，及師生接觸的機會等方面，都是值得注意的問題。此外，簡化電腦會議系統的操作，讓老師們更有信心地使用這工具也非常重要。