It sometimes seems that almost everyone involved in ELT is talking about the "net" and "web sites". The web is only one of several aspects of the Internet available for use with ELT — others include E-mail and Newsgroups — but what do web sites contain for the ordinary language teacher and learners?

Below, I’ve outlined ten sites that I feel are of both potential interest and practical use. I’m not claiming, however, that they are a panacea. Some of the sites are large and need to be investigated in search of suitably relevant teaching material. I located them all by using a "search engine" called "Yahoo". I simply typed in the words ‘English language teaching’, and was shown hundreds of sites to visit. Any of the pages may also be "downloaded" (copied) from the Internet onto hard/soft disk, then duplicated on paper. Many sites also contain files on ELT computer software. This is advertised in the form of either ‘shareware’ for which you are morally obliged to pay the requested fee, or ‘freeware’ for which there is no charge.

ELT ‘Dedicated’ Sites

The eight sites below are what we may call "dedicated sites" - specifically designed for ELT. They range from resources for teachers from OUP, to Academic articles from ‘Linguistic Funland’. ‘English for the Internet’, and ‘Net learn Languages are for more independent, distance-learning. I’ve also indicated the year in which each site was posted.

Planet English, 1998, , is a colourful new arrival to the web, created by Steve Rudolph in India. The ‘Welcome Section’ invited me to the ‘Passbook Center’ where I became a citizen of Planet English and got the passbook and stamps that enabled me to make use of the many services there, including quizzes, free software and key-pals.

The most useful area of Planet English is the ‘Students’ World’. The ‘Activity Center’ there enabled me to copy brief lesson notes and then do some quiz questions which were instantly checked. At the ‘Taking Courses On-line’ page, although courses were still being set up, teachers are told how they could perhaps develop their own courses for Planet English, along with a fee structure!

The ‘Language Resource Center’ contains links to Roget’s Thesaurus, Webster’s Dictionary and ‘The British National Corpus’. Finally, the ‘Message Center’ enabled me to find key-pals from Russia for my class and get information on TESOL events in Canada. Planet English, whilst still developing, is worth a visit by both teachers and learners.

John Willets (1997) John states on its ‘Home Page’: "We hope you find these pages interesting, controversial and fun. This site is not designed for academics". It’s primarily a teacher-resource file which also has links to other ELT sites. The first two sections deal with the register of "Bad Language": eg: "Do you go to the toilet, the loo or the lavatory?".

A useful section is the mysteriously named "The ex-files", that contains pages of grammar activities on areas such as: ‘Prepositions of Time’, ‘Phrasal Verbs’, and ‘How to Write Business Letters’. Answers to each exercise are available, on request to the site, by e-mail. Another section worth looking into is titled "Staffroom Gossip" which provides news, hints and tips for new and inexperienced EFL teachers. Here, shifts in language usage are noted, eg. "an extra of is appearing after ‘outside’ and ‘inside’", although the writers fail to state the sources of their wisdom.

Grammar Help, from Finland, , contains that pioneer of the Internet and ELT, Ruth Vilmi’s, pages of student activities. ‘Grammar Help’ is mainly gleaned from Web sites around the world and contains many highly useful interactive activities. It is written by students at Helsinki University, which explains the presence of texts on topics such as "Queen Beatrice and the Missing Prepositions". In this section students have to gap-fill a lengthy passage with sentences such as:

"…….. the evening I met President Ahtisar who is famous …… his slippery dancing shoes".

I was allowed to use hotlinks to either "Take a Look at the Answers", "Go back to Grammar Help Page", or for help with socio-cultural aspects, such as who exactly President Ahtisar is.

The ‘Queen Beatrice’ text, written by Tuula Narhinen, is available at: http://www.hut.fi/tillrvilmi/langhelp/Grammar/beatrix_test.html

Ruth Vilmi has her own ‘Home Page’ at: www.hut.fi/u/rvilmi/ which lists all other sites she’s been involved with. They are all rich in grammar activities and certainly worth a visit.

Publishing companies are always keen to promote a helpful image and very often provide back-up material to their major course books on the web. Oxford University Press (OUP) posted their new site in September 1997. At their Home Page I was offered a choice of sub-sites including the OUP ELT Catalogue, and Dictionaries and Reference.

At the ELT page I read issue 3 of the OUP On-line magazine "ELT Spectrum". The Free Worksheets section there provides photo-copiable material and tests. I did have to download something called ‘Adobe Acrobat Reader’ version 3 in order to get them, though. Fortunately this wasn’t too difficult and help with this is provided. Sadly, only two worksheets were available: one at upper-intermediate level, which explored the various meanings of "Get", the other, at elementary level, explored relationships between sound and spelling.

Material from issues 1 and 2 of ELT Spectrum were easily accessed and I was keen to download worksheets to accompany ‘The Elephant Man’ in the Bookworm readers series since I teach this book. To do this I had to download the questions for sixteen other titles at the same time, which was rather annoying. The answers to all readers are available on request by e-mail.

A more useful page was at ‘Tips for Teachers’ where I found advice for students about to take the Cambridge FCE oral exam. There were very few links to other sites which was unusual and rather disappointing. Watch out for sites of all other major publishers, too.

English for the Internet (1995) from ‘The Comenius Group’, provides a free EFL school on the Internet. For language beginners there’s a translation of the Home Page into fourteen other languages. The "Next Page" section goes to ‘TESL Ontario’, an "active association of professional and volunteer language teachers, instructors and administrators". "Skip It" jumps to the ‘Virtual English Language Centre’ (VELC). The email keypal connection here is accessed directly at: http://www.comenius.com/keypal/index.htm.

The aim of this site is to provide several language learning activities such as the excellent ‘Fluency through Fables’, and ‘The Weekly Idiom’.

Clicking on "Classes", on the Home Page, I was able to register for listening and pronunciation lessons, although this needed a microphone attached to my PC, a sound card, and familiarity with ‘RealAudio’ encoding technology.

Other classes here include: ’Writing in English for the Internet", ie. writing email letters. To enter you will first need to take a placement test involving writing a composition about someone famous or someone in your family, followed by a multiple choice reading test.

For students wishing to study solely over the net, Net Learn Languages, (1998) is a completely Internet-based language school in which to study English in ‘real time’ (live) via a video-conferencing environment, with the help of native speaker teachers based in London. The possibilities are exciting provided you have the required technology. Classes and timetables for all courses are posted and range from: General English, One to One, and Exam classes. Lessons normally involve groups of six who sit in front of computers around the world and communicate and interact using text, one to one voice capabilities and sometimes video.

The Linguistic Funland was begun in 1994 by Kristina Pfaff-Harris, then a graduate student with her own home page. It’s a list of various linguistic links that form part of the ESLoop, a collection of seventy-nine sites relevant to ELT which also include ‘The Comenius Group’ and Ruth Vilmi’s ‘HUT E-Mail Writing Project’ which I’ve mentioned above. Funland is a large site which is perhaps of more interest to ELT academics, since it contains excellent links to articles on Corpora, Computational Linguistics and Lexical Databases.

The popular Dave Sperling’s ESL Café is certainly worth exploring. The Home Page offers to take you to any of eighteen interesting sections including the ‘Graffiti Wall’. (Watch out in the near future for a review in Issues of Sperling’s ‘Internet Guide’, 1998.)

ELT "Non-Dedicated" sites

Microsoft’s ‘Encarta Online’, (1997) is on the web as a free service to provide basic research information and to introduce web users to its CD form. This more concise web-version contains a search facility. My own search for ‘dinosaurs’ found three articles. From one on ‘duck-billed dinosaurs, I went on to the brief notes on the hadrosaurus.

This site also contains ‘today’s topic’, and ‘Lesson of the Week’. When I looked into this site the lesson was ‘Women in Science’ with a detailed lesson plan and overview, planning considerations and links to related subjects. Two other valuable sections I found were ‘Schoolhouse Teacher Resources’ and Celebrate the Century.

Another great homework helper is the Knowledge Adventure Encyclopaedia in which you can search for your topic or browse the nine sections, including general knowledge’.

Newspapers on the web always provide a rich source of constantly up-dated material in English for teacher to exploit. The Guardian, (1998) is no exception to this.

Apart from excellent sports coverage this site contains material for project work. The coming school year will see many class-readers and course-book projects on the life and times of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. I’m already preparing my class-projects after visiting ‘The Guardian’ page outlining events leading up to the tragic death and the subsequent drama. The full text of speeches, songs and tributes from the funeral service are provided, plus photographs surrounding her busy life.

Wayne Trotman teaches in Izmir, Turkey, and can be reached at wayne@egenet.com.tr