Language Teaching and the Internet

There are also organizations who try to connect students and even entire classes with "key-pals," or e-mail pen-pals. The Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections project (http://www.stolaf.edu/network/iecc/) at St. Olaf University may be the oldest of these, but several others are also working to use e-mail to connect students.

Ruth Vilmi at HUT University in Finland began an email writing project in 1993. In her paper "Global Communication Through E-mail," (http://www.hut.fi/~rvilmi/autumn93/global.html) she discusses the problems and triumphs of this type of program. The report gives extensive detail about both the preparations, assignments, student levels, and implementation of this project, and though her project dealt with the teaching of English as a Foreign Language, it is definitely of interest.

Most participants in e-mail class projects agree that connecting to classes in other areas of the world can be a great motivator for students to write.

Be aware of possible problems.

There are some potential problems in connecting students with others in this way. For one thing, if a student is matched with another, and one of the students just stops writing, the first student can feel rejected or just lose interest in this method of communicating. Teachers can help avoid this problem by keeping in contact with one another. For example, if your class is matched with another, you can keep in contact with your counterpart and try to head off possible problems. If both teachers encourage their students to keep up their pen pal connection, projects such as this can be much more successful.

If your class is matched with individuals, and not another class, you can ask your students to keep you posted on how their pen pal is doing. You may need to look for another pen pal for your student, or, depending on your other students, see if one of your other pen pals will "share" theirs. Keep in mind, however, that some students can become a bit posessive of their pen pals and may not feel comfortable introducing another person into the email conversation.

Another possible problem is a personality conflict between pen pals. If at all possible, in this situation students should generally be assigned a new partner. Unless one of your goals in addition to language learning is to teach the students how to cooperate with someone they may not like, animosity between pen pals does not positively affect the language learning experience. Generally, the goal is to encourage communication in English, and to help the students become comfortable with such communication. If a student does not like the person they must communicate with, they will build up more resistance to the process. This is another area in which it's extremely important that teachers work together.

It's also important to try and match students of similar levels unless you are trying to set up a "peer tutoring" or mentoring situation. Very advanced students matched with beginners can get quite frustrated and feel that they aren't being given the opportunity to learn, while the beginners may feel intimidated by the advanced students. Again, the professional mailing lists such as FLTEACH can be enormously helpful here. The teacher can simply post a message to the list saying, "I'd like to match my low intermediate class of 30 German students with a similar class. Can anyone help?" Organizations such as the Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections project focus specifically on connecting classes with "key-pals" through e-mail, and can be of more help.