Web Archives and Search Engines for ESL Teachers and Learners: Why? What? How? Why Not?

International Symposium on Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching hosted by
The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 14-16 December, 1998.


By George C.K. Jor, The English Language Teaching Unit, The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong. Fax: (852)2603-5157. E-mail: george-jor@cuhk.edu.hk

Executive Summary
This paper/presentation attempts to answer three questions about the "what? why? and how?" of web archives and search engines for ESL teachers and learners. The questions are:

  • What are search engines and web archives?
  • Why should ESL teachers and learners care about them?
  • How can ESL teachers and learners use them more effectively to achieve their goals?

My argument is that if critical thinking is part of all content, critical uses of the web archives and search engines deserve a place in the ESL/EFL curriculum. The presentation is made up of five parts:

  1. Pedagogical considerations of Web-based learning (why)
  2. Introduction to search engines and web archives (what)
  3. Criteria for evaluating web resources (how good or bad)
  4. Search skills and live demonstrations on the Web (how to)
  5. Discussions on the larger implications of these electronic tools on the creation of virtual classrooms and faculty change. (what if and why not).

I shall offer more questions than answers for ESL teachers to think about focusing on the idea of combining technical knowledge and educational principles in the 21st Century. By the end of the presentation ESL teachers will get a selected list and a pretty good idea of useful web resources, search engines and search skills for their teaching and learning.

I. Pedagogical considerations of Web-based learning (why)

The first lesson I learnt about the use of the Web in the ESL classroom is this --- "Let’s decide where we’re going before we try to get there". We need to establish our search goals or lesson objectives and keep them in mind throughout the search process. Facing the onslaught of information explosion today, how do we make sense of all this information and find what we need? We need to equip ourselves with knowledge and skills of new information tools such as automated web search (search engines).

Why should language teachers care about web-based learning? My experience is: increased access, increased flexibility and greater learner control. The world is changing. The future has arrived with an accelerated digital revolution. The digital revolution of the last thirty years has significantly changed the ways we work, communicate, teach and learn today. Advances in information technology have empowered ESL teachers and students with ways to access, control, communicate, publish and disseminate huge amount of information that no kings in the past had ever been able to do. The Web can benefit teaching and learning with global access, geographic independence, temporal independence and platform independence (that is, no need of a specific browser). It helps to bring people together by increasing of access to a great variety of resources:

  • Access to information
    • Timely information (up to the minute, e.g. RTHK on the Internet: News Update)
    • Arcane information (otherwise unpublishable, of highly special interest,)
    • Diverse information (from many sources, of many points of view)
    • Digital information (archival, cheaply and perfectly reproducible)
    • Convergence of modes (text, graphics, sound, and movies)
  • Access to communication
    • Synchronous (text: chat, ICQ; audio: Internet Phone; video: CUSeeMe)
    • Asynchronous (Web e-mail, web board)
    • One to many ("push" technology, e.g. listerv.)
    • Many to one ("pull" technology, e.g. threaded discussion, newsgroups, etc.)
    • Digital communication (e.g. digital library, reproducible and archivable)
  • Access to remote computing power and control
    • Archie: automated Internet search service that finds all files with a given name
    • Databases published on the Web. Clients can edit data on a remote server.
  • Access to collaboration
    • Creating community of interest: people of common interests
    • People with resources, connections to share
    • People with expertise.
      (Brackett, 1998)

Teaching with the web is all about connections: connecting teachers with course materials and with students. Web resources have the potential of facilitating ESL teaching and learning by adding variety and flexibility, increasing participation and self-access by learners. Learners can control what they want to learn almost anywhere, anytime and control their pace of learning on the Web. It should, however, be noted that the Web tends to expand, but not replace, other ways of learning. The Web offers only potential, but not guarantee. It is up to teachers and students to make critical use of it to realize that potential.

II. Introduction to search engines and web archives (what)
Some information specialists classify Web search tools into two basic types: Directories and Search Engines (Fitzgerald and Burg, 1998). Directories organize web pages within broad topics like the table of contents of a book. They are more selective because many of them are manually created. They offer an overview of a broad topic and are good for browsing. Search Engines are different. They work like the index of a book. They collect, store, and index huge number of web pages in a single, searchable database. There are programs called spiders, robots, or crawlers that gather millions of web pages regularly. These web pages are then indexed and added to the database for searching. Both Directories and Search Engines are web archival resources that store information for searching and retrieval.

Famous examples of Directories include:

  • WWW Virtual Library: URL: http://vlib.org/Overview.html
    This is a highly selective topical guide to academic and research-oriented sites.
  • Yahoo!: URL: http://www.yahoo.com/
    Yahoo is the largest all-purpose directory. Sites are both selected and submitted.

Famous examples of Search Engines include:

  • Alta Vista: Includes about 100 million pages, a translation feature and subject directory
  • Déjà vu: Only indexes Internet Discussion group postings for the last 30 months.
  • Excite: Includes about 55 million pages, subject directory, and news, etc.
  • Hotbot: Includes about 110 million pages, and subject directory.
  • Infoseek: Includes about 30 million pages, and subject directory.
  • Lycos: Includes about 30 million pages, and subject directory.
  • WebCrawler: Includes about 2 million pages, and subject directory.
    (Fitzgerald and Burg, 1998)

Besides, there are metasearch engines. They offer the ability to search several search engines at the same time. Some of the famous metasearch engines are:

III. Criteria for evaluating web resources (how good or bad)

We can evaluate the information found on the web with a selective set of criteria, namely, the source and credibility, the scope and coverage, timeliness and purpose.

  • Source and credibility
    • Who created or published the information?
    • Does it provide a contact person or an e-mail address?
    • Does the web page belong to an individual or to an established institution?
    • Is it possible to tell the credentials of the author or publisher?
  • Scope and coverage
    • Is the material presented a primary source or a secondary source?
    • What is the scope or coverage of the material presented?
    • Is the information presented in a piecemeal or comprehensive way?
    • Can you cross check the information with other library resources on the same topic?
  • Timeliness
    • Can you tell when the web page was created?
    • How up-to-date is the web page?
    • Is the information updated regularly?
    • How stable is the resource? Can you trust it?
  • Purpose
    • Is the web resource intended to inform, explain or persuade?
    • What is the point of view of the author?
    • How objective or biased is the information?
    • Who are the target audience? Is it directed at the general public or a specialized group?

IV. Search skills and Live demonstration (how to)
The Internet is vast and ESL web resources are scattered. Critical skills are crucial to successful searches.
Search can be done by

  • subject directory,
  • keywords,
  • key phrases,
  • the special features the search engine developers have introduced.
  • Many of these features are offered via pull down menus or hyperlinks when users select the "Advanced", "Power", "Expert", "Help", "Search Tips" or "Tips" searching options. These options include:

Special Features

 Meanings

 Coverage

 Web pages, Usenet postings, graphics, or sound files

 Case sensitive

 Better to use lower case. Some engines are case sensitive.

Plurals, variant word endings

Some allow search with an asterisk * after the first few letters. E.g. human*

 Phrase searching

Use quotation marks to allow search as a phrase

 Boolean Searching

AND, OR, and AND NOT are Boolean operators available in most search engines

Words required in search

A+(plus sign) with no space before the word indicates a required word. A-(minus sign) before a word indicates that it be excluded.

Distance between words

Some engines support proximity searching. Proximity operators include ADJ, NEAR (<25 words), FAR (>25 words), BEFORE (words in specified order). Alta Vista also uses ^n between two words where n can be any number. E.g. wisdom ^10 search

Searches by field

Limit search to specific part of a page: title, URL, link, image or site (e.g. site:cuhk.edu.hk for Chinese University sites).

Criteria for search results

Relevancy of search results; highest number of keyword matches. You can see the top 10 or 25 hits.

 Additional features

Language, date, author, newsgroup, subject, daily news, advertisements, maps, stocks, e-mail addresses, pictures, sounds, and international websites.
(Courtesy summary of Fitzgerald and Burg’s workshop, 1998)

We can save time by looking over these search tips and take a couple of minutes to plan before we key in our search. An experienced Internet researcher has also provided some useful search tips:

  1. always aim at high relevancy, small result set
  2. use phrase searching
  3. specify word/phrase that must be present or must be absent
  4. use searching tag. (Liang, 1998)

Phrase searching works much better than a simple keyword search. A simple keyword search will usually retrieve tens of thousands of hits. The researcher has listed searchable parts of a web page as follows:
What Can Be Searched inlcude:

  • title of the web page
  • text in the web page
  • the URL address of the web page
  • host URL of the web page
  • the text in the hyperlink
  • the URL address behind the hyperlink
  • domain of the web page (domain is the last part of the host url of the web page)
  • the name of the java applet
  • the name of the image
    (Liang, 1998)

Live Demonstrations with a search engine and three web resources

Alta Vista http://www.altavista.com
Alta Vista is the only search engines that exhibits all the nine search capabilities.

  1. Indexes the full text in all files in its database
  2. Truncation (*) allows variant word ending, e.g. human*
  3. In a simple search, A plus sign "+" with no space before the word indicates a required word. A minus sign "-" before a word indicates that it be excluded.
  4. Search phrases by quotation marks, e.g. "English language teaching"
  5. Search domain, e.g. domain:edu, domain:com
  6. Search host, e.g. host: yahoo.com
  7. Search title, e.g. title:"Web archives and search engines for ESL teachers and learners"
  8. Search URL, e.g. url:auden to find all pages on all servers that have the world with the name auden in the host name, path or filename.
  9. Search applet, e.g. applet:comet to find pages using applets called comet.
  10. Search image, e.g. image:chomsky to find pages with images called chomsky
  11. Search pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or
  12. URL, e.g. text:funeral blues That can find W.H. Auden’s famous poem "The Funeral Blues."
    "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum..."
  13. Search in the text of hyperlinks, e.g. anchor:"Hong Kong transition"
  14. Search pages with a link to a page with the specified url text, e.g. link:www.cuhk.edu.hk to find all pages linking to CUHK homepage
  15. In advanced search, try the boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT,
  16. words or phrases within 10 words of each other
    (Liang, 1998)

Britannica Online http://www.eb.com:180/
Searchable text of the entire 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica.
E.g. Look up the meaning of the word "paraclete" with the Britannica Online.

Free Online Dictionary of Computing (FODOC)
An online dictionary of technical English. http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/
E.g. Can you find out what the technical jargon SMTP stands for?

The Electric Shakespeare http://webware.Princeton.EDU/Lit131/Scenes.htm
E.g. Can you find a video clip of Macbeth on the Web? (Polanski’s version).
The Complete Works of Shakespeare http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

V. Discussions on the larger implications of these electronic tools on the creation of virtual classrooms and faculty change. (what if and why not).
What are the implications of these web-based tools for education? Imagine that easy connection to the Internet is made available to every teacher and student at home and at school (via wired or wireless access). What paradigm of teaching does it take to meet the needs of the new classroom in relation to the meeting place and time, the mode of instruction, modeling, interacting, gathering resources and linking to resources? Must we get together at the same room at the same time everyday from eight to four? In addition to face-to-face, are there any other means of contact with which we can tell each other what we want to learn? Must teaching and learning take place within the four walls of the physical classroom during school hours? How many resources can you bring to the classroom physically? What if our classroom can be expanded indefinitely in a new online environment? What if we can create new learning spaces and new teaching spaces in a virtual classroom? What cost-opportunities and challenges of education reform are there? Can our schools afford the change, or rather, can our faculty and students afford NOT to change? I have offered many more questions than answers. People see things as they are and ask why. A learning organization sees things as they should be and ask why not.

Conclusion
Uses of English and technology are increasingly connected. That calls for new knowledge and skills with web technologies.A critical understanding and mastery of web archives and search engines are not only desirable, but a requisite in the 21st English classroom. Critical thinking is part and parcel of this knowledge and skill for survival. The information explosion of the last thirty years has made the task of educators and learners an increasingly bewildering one. There has been great confusion about the deluge of information and the nature of knowledge. One of the most serious mistakes in the use of information technology for education is the attitude that giving students information is identical to giving them knowledge. Students need to process the information presented to them, analyze it, evaluate it, interpret it, synthesize it and apply it before it can become knowledge of their own. Knowledge is a very personal thing. It takes a good deal of work in critical thinking and real-life application. One of the greatest English poets of the century, T.S. Eliot, highlighted the urgency and the difficulty of critical thinking in our times when he asked:

Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information? T.S. Eliot, "The Rock"

Uses of information technology in the language classroom offer great potential for language teaching and learning. But we must not be blinded by science. Technology must serve, not dictate our needs. We must not fall into the pit of high-tech classrooms, but low-tech teaching. How do language teachers combine technical knowledge with educational principles and effectively help students develop their language competence and critical thinking abilities? How do we promote what we value with the help of technology in the 21st Century? That is a difficult and challenging topic. One of the ways is to teach effective use of search engines and web archives within the ESL/EFL curriuculum. A professor at the University of Chicago, Norman Maclean (now well-known as the author of A River Runs Through It), was once asked to define a good teacher. He responded simply that "a good teacher is a strong person who cares deeply about a difficult topic." Great teaching is about passion, relationships, critical thinking, fascination, humility and caring. It’s a fine art.

 

 

Appendixes: A Selected List of Web Resources for ESL Learners

Online Encyclopaedia

Encyclopedia Britainnica Online (searchable database of the entire 32 volumes of text) http://www.eb.com

Online English Dictionaries and Thesaurus

The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus http://www.lightlink.com/bobp/wedt/
Presented by Robert Parks and the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago.

HyperText Webster Gateway http://work.ucsd.edu:5141/cgi-bin/http_webster

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus. http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus/
An exploration of sense relationships within the English language. By clicking on words, you follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations.

Roget's Thesaurus http://www.thesaurus.com/

Sites built specifically for English teachers and learners

Purdue Online Writing Lab. By the Purdue University. Over 100 handouts on grammar, business, and writing, etc.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

Dave's ESL Cafe on the Web http://www.pacificnet.net/~sperling/eslcafe.html

EF Englishtown http://www.englishtown.com/English/

English for Internet http://www.study.com/

The Yamada Web Guides to English as a Second Language by the Yamada Language Center of the University of Oregon and it specializes on online WWW links of ESL resources.
http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/esl/html

Virtual Reference Shelf

Virtual English Learning Center http://www.Comenius.com

Virtual Reference Desk http://thorplus.lib.purdue.edu/reference/index.html
Selected Government documents Dictionaries, Acronyms, Information Technology. Phonebook, Area Code Time, Date, etc.

Free Online Dictionary of Computing (FODOC)
An online dictionary of technical English. http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/

Project Barthley Archive (Established 1994) http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/

WordPilot by John Milton. An interactive concordancer on the Web. Shareware (30 days trial period according to author).

References on the uses of Internet Search Tools
Searching the Internet: Recommended Sites and Search Techniques by University at Albany Library http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/search.html

Understanding and Comparing Web Search Tools by Bush Library, Hamline University http://www.hamline.edu/library/bush/handouts/comparisons.html

How to Search Internet Resources by Y.C. Liang, University Library System, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
http://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/uli/bi/srch_eng.htm

Effectively Using Search Engines by Suzan Moody, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
http://www.ilc.cuhk.edu.hk/english/call/callwksps/callsearch.html

Guides to Citing Electronic Information
Library and Information Science: Citation Guides for Electronic Document
http://www.ifla.org/I/training/citation/citing.htm

Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic Information
http://www.uvm.edu/~ncrane/estyles/

A Brief Citation Guide For Internet Sources in History and the Humanities by Melvin E. Page
http://h-net2.msu.edu/~africa/citation.html

Columbia Online Style by Janice R. Walker

Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age http://www.bedfordbooks.com/rd/contents.html
(See "Part Two: How to document source" for both electronic and printed sources)

Evaluation Guides on the Web

Plays of Shakespeare
http://webware.Princeton.EDU/Lit131/Scenes.htm
Video clips of Shakescenes
(BBC Version, MGM Version, Welles Version, Brooks Version, Olivier Version)

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream ( BBC Version 7:27)
  • I Henry (Welles Version 17:7)
  • Macbeth (Polanski Version 5:48)
  • King Lear (Olivier Version 10:17)

The Complete Works of Shakespeare http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

References:

Boswood, T. (1997). New Ways of Using Computers in Language Teaching. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.

Brackett, G. (1998). Designing Educational Experiences with Networks and Webs
(This is one of the Technology in Education courses offered by the Harvard University School of Education. Some of the ideas are summarized here and adapted from the course lectures. URL: http://ghseclass.harvard.edu/t525/)

Brooks, D.W. (1997). Web-teaching: a guide to designing interactive teaching for the WWW. New York: Plenum Press.

Cafolla, R. Kauffman, D. and Knee, R. (1997). World Wide Web for teachers: An interactive guide. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Casson, L., et. al. (1997). Making technology happen: Best practices and policies from exemplary K-12 schools for teachers, principals, parents, policy makers and industry. Southern Technology Council, USA. (http://www.southern.org/edtech/)

Crump, E. and Carbone, Nick. (1997). English online: A student's guide to the Internet and World Wide Web. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Dockterman, D. (1997). Great teaching in the one computer classroom. Boston: Tom Snyder Production.

Fitzgerald, M and B. Burg are information specialists of the Research Services, Widener Library of Harvard University. They offered workshops on WWW Search Engines and Source Evaluation. I participated in one of them on March 12, 1998 and learnt something about their classification scheme.

IT Strategy Committee. (November 9, 1998). Draft Report of the IT Strategy Committee. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Dyson, E. (1997). Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age. New York: Broadway Books.

Gates, B. et. al.(1995). The road ahead. Middlesex:Viking.

Gilster, P. (1997). Digital Literacy. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hanson-Smith, E. (1997). Technology in the classroom: Practice and promise in the 21st Century. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.

Hall, B. (1997). Web-Based Training Cookbook. New York: Wiley Computer Publishing.

Hill, C. (1998). "English in China: Educating for a Global Future". The William P. Fenn Lecture delivered at Faculty of Education in The Chinese University of Hong Kong on October 19, 1998.

Jor, G. et. al. (1998) Internet Basics for Teaching and Learning. Hong Kong: The Arts Faculty, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. (a 135-page handbook for staff and students of the Arts Faculty. Including a CD-ROM and a web site at http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~cmc/netbasics/index.html ).

Kerr, S. T. (1996). Technology and the future of schooling. Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Ninety-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education).

Khan, B.H. (1997). Web-based instruction. Ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications.

Liang, Y.C. (1998). How to Search Internet Resources. Available from the Internet. http://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/uli/bi/srch_eng.htm

Meloni, C. (1998). "The Internet in the classroom", ESL Magazine. January/February, 1998, 10-20.

McCormack, C and Jones, D. (1997). Building a Web-Based Education System. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York: Vintage.

Perkins, D., Schwartz,J., West. W.M. and Wiske, M.S. (1995). Software goes to school: Teaching for understanding with new technologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oppenheimer, T. (July 1997). "The Computer Delusion". The Atlantic Monthly. Available from the Internet http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm

Sandholtz, J.H., Ringstaff, C. and Dwyer, D.C. (1997). Teaching with technology: Creating student-centered classrooms. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization.

New York: First Currency Double Day.

Serim, F. and Koch, M. (1996). NetLearning: Why teachers use the Internet. Sebastopol, CA.: Songline Studios, Inc. and O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Snyder, T. (March 1994). "Blinded by Science". The Executive Educator. 1-5.

Starr, P. (1996). "Computing our way to educational reform." The American Prospect. No.27. (July-August 1996): 50-60. Available from the Internet . http://epn.org/prospect/27/27star.html

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