By Bernard Moro
 |
A website such as this is no advertising gimmick or course description brochure. It is meant to be both content-rich where we can provide content, and a portal to resources we cannot provide better than already existing educational language sites. In other words, the website as we see it should offer finalized material for our students to trust and use at will.
The
English section navigation bar to
the left demonstrates what resources are available to our students from any place on or
outside campus.
We have
methodology regarding how to read
the press, handle film analysis, write professional CVs, essays, etc. But
Write
Essays also contains proofread student material, used here as samples of
good —and sometimes bad— practice.
Web Literacy allows students to work better with web
resources. It links to a site we have built for the Council of Europe. Civilisation accompanies a lecture
delivered on US society. Grammar sites
is quite obvious.
Language db, as the title suggests, is a fairly
exhaustive language database of the notional-functional kind, offered to
students for constructing exposés or essays, while Links
connects with such resources as the Bible online, or AuPair sites, etc.,
maintained under constant surveillance for dead links or inappropriate
contents.
Dictionaries opens onto, among other things, a
user-friendly —and free— Concordancer. |
Because the teacher, in the collective
viewing context, constantly calls in these resources, the students see 1) that
they exist; 2) how to access them; 3) how to use them.
The
Intranet Area opens to a
QuickPlace Collaborative Platform implanted on the University server, and open
to any teacher interested.
For us, the
platform is an environment
where student language is being produced, is in progress. Learning is visible here everywhere in
writing. Traces of learning processes abound, and the teacher sort of
eavesdrops on those, and learns what to teach, the better to assist with the learning.
As is shown in the diagram
above, activities
on the collaborative platform are fed thanks to resources offered on the
website.
Students create corpora
that are either corrected in a tutoring
type setup —where the teacher may link directly to the website resource
relevant to the problem— or simply posted for all to see and react on in the
forums.
Finally, some of the output —for example
on a film-related project— after processing by the teacher or another,
high-level student, is floated online on the official website, for all to see
and emulate.
There is no question that the language
teacher is indispensable at all stages of this process. He still provides
input, whether visual, textual or web-based. But he is now more of a quiet
(now this is culture shock…) Zen master, who points at resources but lets
the disciple discover, explore and create his own path
through learning, only
stepping in discreetly when the situation requires.