School-wide
Internet access is becoming more and more common. If your school is now, or will
soon be, in the position to issue e-mail accounts to individual students, you
may well be wondering how you can put this new tool to work for you in your
language classroom.
Electronic penpals or "keypals" is a highly motivating way for your students to get valuable practice in both reading and writing. Not only can a keypal exchange improve specific skill areas, it can also have a profound impact on your students' attitude towards the target language and culture and provide them with their first chance to really use the language outside the classroom context.
Below we will discuss three types of keypal exchanges: 1) the "traditional" one- on-one type, 2) "tandem exchanges", and finally, 3) "Student List" participation. It's up to you to decide which of these will best meet your needs.
The teacher new to e-mail often thinks that all that is required is to find another class somewhere out there on the Internet that has approximately the same number of students. The problem, of course, is that this isn't usually isn't so easy. Since students tend to be human (at times) some of them may not be very good correspondents. Furthermore, some may not be very good at writing letters of interest to their partner which might cause the relationship to lapse. It only takes one non-writer in a pair for communication to stop altogether! Thus it is highly likely that some students will end up with no one to correspond with, which may or may not be their own fault.
You will probably not find a class with exactly the right number of students, either. While giving extra penpals to the better students in the class with the smaller number of students is one possible solution, a better solution to the attrition and the number-matching problem is simple: Pair up each student with two or three in the opposite class. While not complete guaranteeing that each student will maintain at least one partner, it stacks the odds against it. (See
http://www.stolaf.edu/network/iecc/discussion/nonresponse.html
for
a discussion of the problem of 'non-response' in keypal relationships.)
Another possible problem comes from a mismatch in the number of times that each class meets per week or in the length of the school terms If both of the partner classes are in the same country, then there is a strong likelihood that the classes begin and end at the same time. There are, however, considerable fluctuations once national boundaries are crossed. The school term in Japan, for instance, begins in April and runs until the following February. The terms for most of Latin America are vastly different, as well. See my listing of school terms by country available at:
http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/terms.html
Be sure that you and your partner teacher(s) mutually understand:
Teach them: 1) the technical skills required for e-mail exchange, and 2) the language skills required for effective communication
Before your students send their first letter abroad, have them practice by sending messages to themselves.
Next, be sure to supply them a useful set of phrases for openings, closings and other functions. Students will need a few good models of complete messages so that they can observe the appearance of messages as a whole. Use these to point out the structural aspects of letters. Avoid the idea of supplying a simple template in which they fill in their own particulars since the students of the other class will then receive a full set of virtually identical letters! Multiple samples, or, at least, alternate phrasings will help.
E-mail has at least one feature which can be challenging and perhaps frustrating to teachers: It's messy! The students have differing numbers of penpals and take differing amounts of time to read messages and create responses. This means either that some students may not complete their correspondence in the time allotted in class, or some students may complete it early and have nothing else to do. Time management thus can become a problem if there are not other activities to take up the slack, or if the slow students do not have access to the lab at other hours so that they can catch up.
Another management problem concerns the volume of correspondence and assigning a grade based on their performance. If the students are writing personal letters, you might not want them to submit copies of them to you as proof of their e-mail activity. You might, however, ask them to 'cc' you on at least their first letter so that you can see how well they do on this first, crucial message.
One
solution is to the tracking problem is to have the students keep a log of their
correspondence, perhaps with the following items to fill in per transmission: Date,
From/To, Sent/Rec'd, Lines in
Message, Total Lines, (S/R), (without headers), To
Date.
You
might also ask them to submit a single long file of all of their correspondence,
after they have done through it can replaced any private sections with x's. How
easy this is to do, however, depends on your particular configuration.
One additional benefit to the log is that it can be used for assessment as well, a grade being given based on the total lines sent and received. Students who write stimulating letters will most likely receive longer responses than those who write brief, uninteresting missives. Thus a combination of both sent & received messages tends to work well. (One of my students, however, received the full text of Hamlet by e-mail because his partner in Hong Kong thought that it would contribute to his line count!)
While at first glance it might seem that native speakers would be the ideal choice for partners, consideration has to be given to what the other party would gain from the partnership. While your students' focus will most likely be on the language, correspondence with native partners will most often place your students considerably out of their depth. One way that NSs correspondence has been shown to work is with tandem' pairings, where both partners are seeking help in learning the other's native language. See the following URL for further details.
Learning
in tandem is a form of open learning, where people with different native
languages work together in pairs in order
to
learn each other's language.
to
learn more about their partner and his culture.
to
exchange knowledge - e.g. about their professions.
http://www.slf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/email/infen.html
The
Tandem project even has suggested activities, which can be accessed from the
following menu on their home page.
Activity
Groups:
In
order to solve address some of the problems inherent to one-on-one keypal
exchanges, this writer with Mark Warschauer (then at Charles University, Prague)
and Lloyd Holliday (La Trobe University, Melbourne) created the Student List
Project, or "SL Lists" for short, in February of 1994 for students of
ESL (English as a Second Language).
The concept is simple: Students send their messages to an e-mail list rather than to an individual, and the messages thus sent are re-transmitted to all current subscribers. Not only does this allow the students to reach a broader audience but it also provides a way for students to find one-to-one penpals who share similar interests.
Currently there are ten lists ranging from general ones such as CHAT-SL to ones on specific topics such as MOVIE-SL and SPORTS-SL. One list, ENGL-SL, is available for students to discuss their language learning problems and to ask questions about English grammar. Each list has, generally, two 'monitors' -- teachers who receive the postings and intervene when necessary to stimulate discussion or answer questions.
The SL lists thus allow students to receive mail in the target language without them having to worry about responding to what they receive. They can wait until the feel ready to write or until a topic comes along on which they have something to contribute.
This project is now in its third year of operation and has much to recommend itself. Cumulatively, there have already been over 5000 subscriptions to the lists. If any reader of this article is interested in setting up a similar set of lists for a commonly taught modern language, I will be glad to provide the technical details. For a more complete outline of the SL List Project, see:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/education/sl/sl.html
Keypals can be an extremely rewarding experience for your students but don't expect everything to go well the first time. Just like any other aspect of your teaching, it will take some experience to discover the best implementation for your own curriculum. Even with first-time glitches, however, you can be sure that it will be an experience that your students will not forget. Don't be surprised to find some students exchanging snail-mail addresses with their keypals, turning a virtual friendship into an actual one. It happens!
Thomas Robb is Chair of the Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kyoto Sangyo University. He is past president of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT). He gives frequent workshops on using the Internet for language education.