Paper Review: The Internet for English Teaching: Guidelines for Teachers by Mark Warschauer & P. Fawn Whittaker

This entry is a review of the paper "The Internet for English Teaching: Guidelines for Teachers"
by Mark Warschauer and P. Fawn Whittaker. The original paper can be viewed here.

As the title of this paper suggests, the authors have made an attempt to provide guidelines for teachers who may have found the Internet as a useful tool for English teaching. The authors claim that these guidelines emerge form an investigation of experiences of teachers who used the Internet for language teaching.
Having been claimed by the authors, these guidelines are independent of technology itself as it grows unbelievably fast that makes it rather impossible to harness. These guidelines are designed to help teachers implement computer network-based activities into second language classroom.
The following are the guidelines presented in this paper:

1- Consider carefully your goals
2- Think integration
3- Don't underestimate the complexity
4- Provide necessary support
5- Involve students in decisions

The first guideline advises teachers to consider their goals carefully. In this section the authors try to provide the reader with the reasons which they believe are the ones for using the Internet in language teaching. The reasons are:

1- It is believed that the linguistic nature of online communication is desirable for promoting language learning
2- It creates optimal conditions for learning to write, since it provides an authentic audience for written communication
3- It can increase students' motivation
4- It is believed that learning computer skills is essential to students' future success
The authors mention that the hierarchical presentation of these reasons by no means implies any priority in reasons. They also state that since there are many different ways of integrating the Internet into classroom instruction teachers should clearly know what they are using the internet for. They close this section by concluding that random use of the Internet usually brings results of not too much value.
The second guideline invites teacher to be more integrative about the concept of online communication. The authors claim that one of the very first activities that teachers encourage students to do is to find a key pal. The authors believe that simply finding a key pal and starting to exchange information with him or her does not bring any significant result. Teachers should intervene and create activities which create sufficient linguistic and cognitive demands on the student. This teacher intervention is most successful when it brings about activities and projects that are well-integrated into the course curriculum as a whole. This guideline asks teachers to try to think about how to integrate online connections into the class rather than just adding them as just a new type of activity.
Complexity is a major issue. This is the claim made by the authors in the third guideline. This guideline asks teachers not to underestimate the complexity of this technology in various levels. The first level is that though teachers themselves may be novices in computer use but at least they have the advantage knowing English a quality that students may lack alongside with computer illiteracy. The second level is concerned with technology availability inside and outside the classroom. This guideline attempts to bring this idea into perspective that in using Internet-based activities one must not be initially too mush ambitious.
Based on the previous guideline, the fourth guideline asks teachers to be supportive of their students when facing technical problems. A number of ways has been suggested such as providing detailed handouts, establishing training courses, assigning students and etc.
Finally, the fifth and last guideline, based once again on the complexities and also the notion of leaner-centered curriculum, encourages teachers to conduct regular consultations with students in form of anonymous surveys, class discussions, or similar means of involving students in expressing their opinions about the process of implementing technologies.
This is a short paper on how to use the Internet in language teaching. This not being lengthy appears to be both positive and negative. Of course it is worth mentioning that by lengthy I mean a more detailed paper. It is considered to be positive for it provides a reader without too much back ground knowledge with an opportunity to find the text useful and too technical. But on the other hand it appears to be negative because it leaves more curious readers who desire to find more detailed procedures of coming to these conclusions empty-handed. In other words the text is not too much self-sufficient as it asks readers to refer to referential literature in several occasions.
It is also worth mentioning that the authors themselves admit that such a short paper can not fully cover the vast area of network-based language teaching.