By Bernard Moro

A lot of universities today across Europe are developing curriculums that include in-company training for their students, especially in vocational areas. In Grenoble, we have the Institut Universitaire Aménagement du Territoire et Urbanisme, a college that produces young professionals in the areas of Development Management and Town Planning.

Now obviously a normal teacher of English is not necessarily well-versed in such specific areas of the English language —or his native language, for that matter. How do you bring your students the lexis appropriate to their future field of activity? The traditional solution is to list the words they need and try to find out for yourself their equivalents in the target language. Then you produce this bilateral catalog in class and force them to learn it by heart for the next session. How brillant. Within two weeks, they will have forgotten everything.

But another solution comes to mind. You go to the computer lab with your students and instruct them as below —a copy of the Word file I had ready for them on the network.

Work in pairs.
Run Word.
Save file as your combined names, ie : Vion-Charles.doc.
Start browser.
Go Google or Yahoo, depending which you feel more familiar with. Type in "town planning" or "sustainable development ". If you use Yahoo, make sure you use it appropriately (see here for more).
Explore one site in depth, and take notes in your word file as stated below:

http://www.blahblahblah.com

organisation (university/ company, etc.)
aspects: layout, easy navigation, good graphics
contents: description
personal view, esp. why you retained this particular site
vocabulary: explain one or two technical phrases encountered while reading the site, which you did not understand at first.

Feel free to access the American Heritage Dictionary site if necessary, but don't get trapped.
Compose your report from your notes, using the resources in Word, ie., the outline mode, the thesaurus and spell-check facilities; save it and upload it on the platform.
If you haven't done it in the first place, re-compose an outline from which you will speak out to the rest of the class. No fully-written composition will be allowed during your informal exposé.

The exploration proper, along with the note-taking, takes at least an hour, and another hour is required for drawing up their report. On the next session each group shows their findings by taking the whole class to 'their' site, commenting on it very informally as they go along. Then others may field questions if they so wish, etc.

Before the next face-to-face session they must finalize and upload their reports onto the collaborative platform for the teacher to read, correct and grade at leisure. Then these are turned into one html page that is fed into the official website of our Center for Modern Languages. In other words, the private work of those groups, which initially was of surprisingly good manufacture anyway, once validated by the teacher, has become official website material, and a very useful tool for other students of the same College, as can be seen here.

In terms of language learning, those students practiced Written Comprehension, Note-taking, Composition and Oral Skills. Almost unconsciously, they learned the lexis of their trade, used it immediately when taking notes and making their oral exposés, and because their partners had explored the same areas of activity and now shared this knowledge, they understood even the technicalities of their discourse. Beyond this immediate satisfaction was of course the long-term pride to have contributed —and signed by their names— to an official university site.

The platform was used here as a hatchway of sorts, to get a feeling of being published and make the necessary adjustments with the teacher's help, in light of this situation before the actual publication.