A browse through recent searches highlights relevant material from the virtually limitless resources of the internet
We all know that the internet is a wonderful resource, but many of us are unsure how to identify online materials that will work well with our students. In an age when materials have become super-abundant, how are we to select from the virtually (yes, the pun is intended) infinite world of material that is just a click away?
In order to answer this question, I'm going to take a step back in time to that age of innocence before the fateful day in 1995 when a colleague persuaded me to attend a talk on "the world wide web", a topic about which I knew nothing at all.
It's September 1994, and I've just taken up a post in Hong Kong. It isn't long before I discover that the crime pages of the Hong Kong newspapers are a shortcut to learning about my new host culture.
I still remember the report about a man who telephoned the soft-drinks manufacturer Schweppes to say that he'd found black bits in his tonic water but, if they paid him a million dollars, he wouldn't tell the newspapers. When asked how they were to get in touch with him, he gave his mobile number. (He'd just bought one of those new telephones that you carry around with you and he wanted to make use of it right away.) The police duly paid him a visit and found that he did indeed have several bottles of tonic water with black bits in. However, the Schweppes labels were fakes. When the case came to court, he pleaded not guilty, offering in his defence that he'd imitated a scenario that he'd seen on the US television programme LA Law, so it wasn't really his fault that he'd been led astray.
The value of such a story lies not so much in its authenticity but, more importantly, in its relevance. For me in 1994 it offered, or appeared to offer, a window on aspects of the host culture in which I found myself. But for a language learner in Brazil or Russia or Turkey, although authentic (ie written in English for native-speaker readers), it isn't relevant. Bizarre, more like.
The sociolinguist Suresh Canagarajah, in the introduction to his paper Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice, contrasts authentic and relevant materials, pointing out that "authentic" materials are authentic, not for the learner, but for a community of native speakers. Canagarajah sees authentic materials as a typical feature of the "hierarchical" paradigm characterised by the top-down imposition of native-speaker models and materials. By way of contrast, relevant materials pattern with the "levelled" paradigm characterised by bottom-up, teacher determination of the most appropriate variety of English and materials.
The hierarchical paradigm is, of course, a throwback to the time when English was learned "as a foreign language" by means of which a learner might gain access to an Anglo culture. The levelled paradigm reflects the reality of English as a deterritorialised lingua franca, a language of representation in which millions of users post internet messages no matter what language they speak at home with their friends.
Returning to the question of how to select from the world of authentic material that's just a click away, we find it difficult to know where to start precisely because most of what's out there isn't relevant, either to us or to our students. How then to identify relevant material?
In my experience, a good way to begin is to ask ourselves what exactly we personally find relevant on the internet. All we need to do to answer this question is to click on "history" in the tool bar of our browser. Doing this as I write, I discover the last three items I Googled were "tyres", "lottery results" and "gites Alsace".
"Tyres" led me to a website with pictures of 10 different makes of tyre that fitted my car, each accompanied by short descriptions of their different attributes. Ideal for your teenage Brazilian motor-racing enthusiasts, who could draw up a list of best buys according to various criteria – performance on wet roads, braking distance, expected life, price etc. Having identified a potential best buy, they could then do what I did and Google the name of the particular tyre: this led to another website, where I found dozens of reviews.
"Lottery results" led me to the expected discovery that my six chosen numbers hadn't won anything. I can picture your Russian learners having endless fun (and number practice) explaining their choice of six numbers and then checking to see how well they would have done. All this followed by work on conditionals: if I'd chosen seven instead of eight, I'd have won $10. And then speculating about how they might have chosen the six numbers that would have made them millionaires.
"Gites Alsace" led me to a website with 30 pages of holiday cottages, each with several photographs, a list of facilities, a location map, a table of availability and a description of local facilities. After carefully weighing up size of property, price, location, outdoor space, availability of washing machine, proximity to owner etc, I did indeed book one. Imagine the fun your Turkish learners would have with a few hundred euros to spend on a week in France. And for your more advanced learners working with the sometimes eccentric English descriptions, a lot of interesting language awareness work too.
Of course, this is only a tiny snapshot of what's relevant to me on the internet. A better way is to ask your learners to bring a history of their own recent internet searches to class. They translate the search words into English and Google again: relevant material fills the screen.
Peter Grundy has more than 40 years' experience as a teacher and trainer. His most recent books are English through Art (Helbling Languages, 2011) and The Pragmatics Reader (Routledge, 2011)