Language(s)

Spanish

Learner level

Advanced

Institution

University of Southampton

Name(s)

Contact details

Objectives

The aim of this case study was to obtain data on how Foreign Language Higher Education students interact with the Web in the context of a search for content/reading task. The students looked at relevant information for a subsequent project. The students were observed and filled in pre and post questionnaires.

Implementation

The users in this case were 36 final year university students of Spanish taking a resource-based module, where throughout the year they were asked to produce newspaper-style articles on current topics in the Spanish-speaking world.

A Website was set up for the students to research the topic of the Gibraltar crisis of May 1999. The students had to get all the necessary information to write an article.

The index page provided a brief introduction in Spanish to the topic and two sections: a "press" section which included links to five further Webpages each with a selection of relevant articles from Spanish and British online newspapers and a second section, "video", which produced, when clicked on, an MPEG video from Spanish a news programme.

The Website was built with a number of "glitches" (such as broken links) which I believe represent the most usual one can come across when surfing the Net.

The students were given 30 minutes to obtain as much information as possible on the topic, find out the main events and key people involved. Twenty-three of the participants accessed the Website in pairs, with myself behind them observing and taking notes of their comments. The remaining thirteen accessed the Website individually.

Outcome

The general impression is that students perceive the Internet as a complement to traditional teaching methods and prefer the latter to the former. The students seem to rate the Internet a little better when compared to other resources such as reference and course books and topic boxes, but many of the students still prefer traditional methods as their main source of information.

Seventeen of the students think that information is easy to find and fourteen the opposite. It appears that once they have found it they consider it sufficiently informative, as twenty-nine agreed with this statement and only four disagreed.

When asked if they make notes of grammar or vocabulary when using the Web, fifteen students answered "no" and eighteen "yes", but out of the latter, fourteen specified that they do so after printing.

Another question asked the students whether they preferred paper-based resources to the Web. Twenty-three did and ten did not. There were some students who saw benefits in both.

A further question was "in your opinion what is the best thing about the Web as a language learning tool?". The replies were varied: variety of information (11), foreign papers available for free (4), up-to-date information (4), finding information (3), World-wide information (2), variety of articles, exercises and texts available in one place (2). A student summarised the general feeling of their perception of the Internet: "I view it as an information source rather than as a language learning tool".

Evaluation

In my opinion, there are two main problems to be encountered with the use of WebPages as a research tool for language learning. One of them is actually finding the resources available. Search engines and language learning interfaces provide a great quantity of URLs, but the suitability of some of those search results is questionable, which is the second main problem. On many occasions the author of the page is not known, and thus the authority of the information and claims their WebPage provides is very relative, as is their spelling, grammar, vocabulary, etc. Students may come across rude materials, incorrect facts and use language and assume it is correct, as it is a "published" work.

A further problem, this time not related to content but to hardware, is speed. Many students will get frustrated by the slow connection and rate of display of pages and information.

The most obvious result from the study was the realisation that students do not read online. All of the students skimmed through the information (the time limit should have been longer) and once they found information that was valuable they printed it. When asked in an interview whether they always do that all of the participants replied that they never read a text online.

The video item was disappointing too, as all the students made an effort to understand the input but failed to take in the content, that is they understood what was said, but did not use the information.

Project URL

http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/fernando
This site is used in the main for educational purposes.