Читать книгу The Internet - David Hardisty - Страница 6

Who is the book for?

This book is intended for language teachers who have at least some experience of working with computers, either for their personal use or for language teaching. However, since our Activities assume differing amounts of computer expertise, whether your computing experience is great or small, you will find ideas in the book that you can use.

The aims of the book

Although they have been used for teaching since the 1960s, computers only became practical and affordable for language learning in the early 1980s, when relatively inexpensive personal computers first became available. The first Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs were mainly used for manipulating words and sentences, playing games with students, testing them, and giving them feedback on their performance. Used in this way the computer has often been described as the ‘medium of the second chance’ (because the activities usually let you try more than once to get an answer right) and of risk-taking (because you can make mistakes in your answers without other students knowing). We feel that both descriptions can be applied to activities on the Internet.