by Jarek Krajka
jkrajka@batory.plo.lublin.pl

The editorial team of Teaching English with Technology has spent busy holiday time preparing the next, fifth, issue of this free electronic journal for teachers of English interested in using the Internet and computers in their teaching. Also in this issue we have tried to maintain the general line of the Journal, namely making it as practical and immediately useful for teachers as possible. It is hoped that the journal is both an inspiring food for thoughts for teachers and a how-to manual with classroom ideas, useful tips and handy lesson plans.

As the editor of Teaching English with Technology, I am proud to announce that it is constantly growing, reaching almost 600 subscribers by email, while the Web version (available at http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/callnl.htm) is visited more than 200 times each month. Some subscribers expressed their interest in finding out what parts of the world the Journal is distributed to. Of course, it is not always possible to tell the country from the email address, but to my knowledge, apart from almost 100 subscribers from Poland (mostly participants of The British Council Poland ICT courses, conducted by the editor of the Journal), there are many others from the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Brazil, China, Taiwan, but the Journal reaches also other places such as East Borneo, Lithuania, Mexico, Slovakia, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Uruguay, Malaysia or India. What is more, with permission, the Journal is forwarded to national discussion lists for English teachers in Singapore and Bosnia and Hercegovina, reaching 200 teachers in each of these. Thus, it can be said that the Journal is truly international, with the editors coming from Poland, Hungary and Spain.

This international character can also be seen in the content of the Journal: in this issue, we can see an article contribution from Hungary, an ESP submission from Spain, lesson plan contributions from Poland, Taiwan and Australia, website reviews from Poland, software reviews from the USA and Poland, a conference report from Poland.

Also, this issue presents a very promising trend: more and more of our subscribers decide to share the results of experiments, the findings of studies or classroom ideas with other subscribers. In this way they work to make the Journal better, to make it a vehicle for collaboration and exchange of views on using technology in teaching.

Thus, the article, "Introductions and Conclusions in Advanced EFL Students’ Writing: Evidence from the Corpus," is written by the Journal's co-editor, Jozsef Horvath from the University of Pecs, Hungary. The author discusses the subject of corpus linguistics, illustrating how a language teacher may benefit from introducing a CL method to test hypotheses about learner writing. Definitely, his findings and solutions to university courses can be applied also in other teaching environments.

The Internet for ESP column continues the idea of presenting different activity structures that can be used when teaching English for Specific Purposes. As in last issue, also this time Maria Jose Luzon from the University of Zaragoza describes another type of information collection and analysis activities, namely "virtual fieldtrips" ("tele-fieldtrips"). The author gives the theoretical assumptions underlying this type of activity, outlines the general considerations that need to be taken into account when using fieldtrips in the classroom, and finally provides an impressive list of sites containing virtual fieldtrips.

In this issue there are three lesson plans: the first one, "What's On" by Mirosława Podgórska, a secondary school teacher from Zamość, Poland, is an interesting attempt to supplement a lesson from a coursebook, Enterprise 3. I strongly recommend having a good look at the lesson, at the coursebook and comparing the advantages and drawbacks of an Internet-based lesson as opposed to a coursebook one. The two other plans, "A Virtual Visit to the National Gallery of Art" by Shiao-Chuan Kung from Taiwan and "Appreciation of Art" by Renata Chylinski from Australia are examples of telefieldtrips giving students the opportunity to visit places and see things they would never do in real life.

As for Website Reviews, this month the focus of the reviewer was on different sites helpful in writing instruction. Thus, readers can find pages preparing for exam writing, pages allowing students to participate in writing exchanges over the Internet, letting students to create their own newspaper or play with language in somewhat different kinds of writing. The focus of this issue’s Book Review section is Internet English, very well-known Internet coursebook, probably the first of this kind ever published. Two Software Reviews are quite different from each other: on the one hand, Perry Christensen from Brigham Young University discusses Micrograde, a very useful tool for organising classroom data and grades by teachers; on the other hand, Jarek Krajka reviews Oxford Advanced Learner's CD-ROM Dictionary, a fundamental reference tool for ESL learners. Finally, Reports from Past Events section features a report from "Exeter CALL - The Challenge of Change, " a big and successful conference held in Exeter between September 1^st and 3^rd 2001.

I hope that you will find the Journal useful and that it will provide some answers to your teaching problems. It is also my deep and sincere wish that for next issues you will be still willing to share your ideas, solutions and teaching techniques.

I wish you good reading.