Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Electronic resources for language teaching and learning: cornucopia or information overload?

then we can share the information with similar-minded institutions, and also share the task of verifying and evaluating the websites. 7. Postscript I realise that I may - unintentionally and inadvertently - have put off some colleagues who have become interested in using electronic resources for their teaching and learning, by focussing on the problems involved. For those colleagues, who may be benumbed by the awesome advances in Internet technology, and feel like a rabbit trapped in the headlights of an onrushing car, there are a few simple points which may help to ease their anxieties. I summarised them as follows in my recent Sogndal course: 1. Computer technology is here, so why not make use of it? Computers have become part of our daily lives in the past decade, in our homes, schools, shops, and offices. Many of us use computers to write letters, to email friends and colleagues, to search Websites for information, and perhaps even to do our accounts, to produce course notes, or school timetables. Why not also use them in our teaching? 2. The pace of change may itself be one of the problems. Computer technology continues to progress at an incredible rate. From mainframes to desktop machines, laptops, palmtops, and notebooks. Processor speeds have vastly increased. New formats and media: from floppy disks to CD-Roms, zip-drives, writable CDs and DVD (Digital Video Disk). We may be worried that things we learn about today may be obsolete tomorrow. But our students will often be more comfortable with computers than we are. We can utilise their enthusiasm, experience, and ingenuity. 3. There are two main approaches to using computers in the classroom. In computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems, the computer is actually used as a surrogate teacher. In the data-driven learning (DDL) technique, the computer acts as an informant. The teacher's role is more like a research supervisor. 4. The use of corpora in language learning is increasing. A corpus is a structured collection of language texts, and it can be used for various purposes: providing examples, checking existing reference materials (dictionaries, grammars, etc), generating exercises, raising language awareness, etc. 25