|
IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 2, Issue 1 (January 2002) |
|
|
IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 2, Issue 1 (January 2002) |
|
|
Editorial |
||||||||||||||||
| |
|
|
|
by Jarek Krajka This issue of "Teaching English with Technology" starts the second year of its existence. Thus, I would like to make a brief summary of the development of the Journal during this year. "Teaching English with Technology, a Journal for Teachers of English" was started by a group of enthusiasts from IATEFL Poland Computer Special Interest Group. My idea to publish a Journal like that was supported by other SIG members during the IATEFL Poland National Conference in Cracow, and I would like to thank especially Ela Gajek, IATEFL Poland Computer SIG coordinator, and Wojciech Drajerczak, The British Council Poland ICT Teacher Education Project Coordinator, for their encouragement and helpful ideas. The first January issue mainly consisted of contributions written by the undersigned, as well as my fellow teachers and trainees. After the announcement about the Journal on the international discussion lists such as TESLCA-L and NETEACH-L I received as many as 150 messages from people willing to receive the Journal. Finally, the first issue was published on the Web at the same URL it is accessible today, namely at http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/callnl.htm. Here my great thanks go to Wojciech Korput, IATEFL Poland Computer SIG webmaster, who has worked hard to convert the mail-form of the Journal into webpages, and without whose help the Journal would not develop that quickly.With next issues, the number of subscribers was growing rapidly, mostly as a result of my announcements on discussion lists. Also, after the Journal website was listed in some well-known EFL/ESL directories (Yahoo, Internet TESL Journal's Links for Teachers, and many others) I started receiving more and more subscription requests and journal submissions. The next big step in the development of the Journal was when Jozsef Horvath kindly offered to review articles for publication, and Maria Jose Luzon de Marco agreed to become the co-editor responsible for The Internet and ESP section. Finally, Marek Wozniak joined the editorial team as the Website reviews editor. In this way, the Journal has become truly international, joining ELT professionals from different countries. Next issues brought more and more submissions, as well as reviewing requests from software manufacturers and website owners. At present, after six issues, the Journal has almost 600 subscribers from many countries of the world, with the biggest numbers coming from Poland, the USA, China, Taiwan and Japan. The Journal's website has been visited almost 7000 times since its launch in January. The final milestone in the growth of the Journal is the present issue, where the readers can find the conference proceedings from the conference entitled Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics, held in Bukowy Dworek, Poland, in April 2001. The organisers of the conference asked the Editors of "Teaching English with Technology" to devote the January issue of the Journal to the conference proceedings. This clearly demonstrates how the Journal has gained prestige and recognition among CALL professionals in Poland and abroad. As expressed in the Introduction by the guest editor, Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak, the conference proceedings contain "the discussion of a variety of CAAL issues: from the use of multimedia programs (Shevel), through electronic dictionaries (Sobkowiak), computer-mediated communication (Jagielowicz), teacher training in web skills (Krajka), intelligent CALL (Tarantowicz-Gasiewicz), to web-page design (Topol)." It is hoped that the Journal readers will find it interesting to read the articles. The Internet for ESP section features a description of another activity structure for teaching ESP with the Internet. This time, Maria Jose Luzon de Marco writes about "Ask-an-expert" activity, where students can formulate questions for the subject matter experts to answer. The author gives plenty of links to websites where such experts can be contacted. Two Internet lesson plans are quite different from each other. "Can we do without inventions" by Miroslawa Podgorska is a lesson consolidating searching techniques and teaching students the effective use of Internet browsers. The second plan, "Explorers - going beyond limits" by Jarek Krajka, is an attempt to supplement a coursebook, Opportunities Intermediate, with an Internet lesson consolidating the material from the book and adding some additional dimension to it. A Word from a Techie section features a text "Simulated English native speakers" by Guo Shesen. This interesting description of how to use Text-to-Speech software to make virtual English native speakers is a must to read for teachers who want to provide students with native speaker language input while it is impossible to employ a native speaker teacher. This month, Pawel Wieclawski reviews Hyperfolio, a computer program making it possible to capture different materials from the Web and organise them into worksheets. Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the report from ELTOC (The ELT online conference), written by Phil Brabbs. It is especially worth reading as the conference was one of the first events conducted fully online, with the use of WWW, chat and email. I hope that this issue of "Teaching English with Technology" will be an interesting and inspiring read. 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 with others. I wish you good reading. | ||||||||||||
|
Last Updated: January 10, 2002 |
