Website

Draft

Definition

• A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages
  • either common to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet.
  • or a more self-contained collection within a (sub)domain (e.g. this Wiki)

Websites as a new genre

Websites are a new genre that has developped thanks to the emergence of Internet. All of websites, despite their differences, share some characteristics related to their function, layout, language and the audience they are aimed at.

As the general purpose of websites is to reach a very wide audience that could be located anywhere in the world, the main feature they all share is their long-distance and large-scale communicative function. Indeed, they consist in a series of documents that are published on the Net so that as many readers as possible may access to them.

Their layout and graphic aspect is strictly related to their main function: their structure, the graphology of their texts, their images and the arrangement of wording of their hyperlinks play a key role in catching the audience attention and keeping readers at that particular site. Therefore, it is very important that a website shows an attractive graphics and a layout that allows viewers to surf within the site easily and quickly.

As far as their typical structure is concerned, websites consists of a set of webpages linked together via hiperlinks. They are made up of:

• a main page, which is often called a home page, that usually contains a head with a title, a short presentation of the site, some images and a list of contents that serve as hyperlinks.
• other webpages, which develop the contents and consist of quite long texts, images and sometimes audiofiles or videos related to the content;
• hyperlinks, which are associations among the various webpages, that are very useful for readers because enable them to quickly understand what contents the website includes and go directly to the webpage they are concerned with without having to follow a sequential order (this special kind of consultation is called surfing).

Concerning the language, home pages are generally characterized by few complete sentences that introduce the site to viewers and a number of noun phrases or post-modified noun phrases that serve as links, while the other webpages consist above all in complete sentences which are organized in paragraphs. As regards the register used, it depends a lot on the specific kind of the website, e.i. on the specific purposes and specific kinds of audiences it want to address. For example, istitutional websites are typically characterized by formal language, while personal websites, such as weblogs, or sites that want to establish a direct contact with readers usually use informal language.

However, it is very difficult to generalize and identify some common features because websites differs a lot one from another. If one want to identify some specific characteristics, he/she has to base himself/herself on specific types of webstes.

Educational Usage

The Internet is made up of a great number of different websites (Wikipedia) , each of which has its main purpose. Among these there are many websites that have an educational purpose and, as such, they have been adopted by teachers in their classrooms. This is true, for example, for language teachers.

Many pedagogists have analysed this phenomenon and have demonstrated how important and effective it is for students who are learning a foreign language to integrate traditional language lessons in the classroom with online language lessons.

• In an abstract of her article The web as a vehicle for constructivist approaches in language teaching, pubblished in the Cambridge Journals Online, Uschi Felix highlights the main aim of her work: to analyse “whether Web technology has the potential to add value to face-to-face language teaching” and to prove at the end of her work that it does because it offers “an environment for interactive learning that can foster the acquisition of communicative skills”.
• In her article New Era Trends And Technologies in Foreign Language Learning: An Annotated Bibliography, Janice B. Paulsen, from the University of Richmond, claims that this type of foreign language instruction increases “the students' natural motivation to speak another language and get inside another culture”. She also affirms that “Web-based learning activities can improve student performance in much the same manner as learning the language and culture while studying abroad”.
• Meena Singhal, from the University of Arizona, points out the benefits of the Internet for foreign language education in the article The Internet and Foreign Language Education: Benefits and Challenges. In particular, she highlights:
  • the communication benefits of the Internet
  • how the Internet can be considered a great source of accessible information for language learners (it is important for language learners also to understand the culture of the target language and through the Internet students “can obtain geographical, historical, social/cultural, economic, and political information from the countries in which the target language is spoken”, for example by reading online newspapers.)
  • in the Internet a student can find esl websites which provide language activities to practice the specific areas of language learning.

Therefore, today there are more and more peolpe who believe the Internet should be used for language learning. This opinion is becoming even more supported thanks to the growing presence of websites for educational language learning usage. According to my personal experience of these last months in my bloggingenglish course, the main websites for English learning a student can find on the Internet are:

• Blogs, i.e. websites where language students can write articles to practice their writing skills. Students can work either alone to their own blogs or together with their teacher and classmates to a collective blog. In my bloggingnglish-course experience there was a collective blog, where the teacher would write weekly e-tivities for the students to accomplish, and then every student had his/her own blog where he/she would post the article required by each e-tivity. An activity of this kind not only allows students to practice their English writing skills but also many other skills. First of all students learn to search for information on the Net using research websites, such as google, del.ici.ous, wikipedia, etc. Then the student practices his/her reading skills when going through the information found. Moreover, each student gets the chance to comment on his/her classmates’ works, learning in this way to analyse critically an English piece of writing and each student also recieves comments on his/her work and can therefore correct eventual mistakes.
• Research websites, like google, del.ici.ous, wikipedia, etc. Websites useful for language learners to get information on any topic in the target language.
• Online dictionaries and grammars, which students can easily consult for any kind of linguistic or grammatical doubt without losing too much time.
• Online libraries and good collections of online literary classics, which students can consult in their spare time, if they like reading books, enriching in this way their target language vocabulary.
• Culture Websites, i.e. websites which provide students with online newspapers, radio broadcasts, tv news, movies, etc.
• Websites with podcasts ( podcasting), which represent an important source for language learners who want to improve their listening skills.
• Wikis, which may be useful for students who want to retrieve information on any topic in the target language, or, in a higher level, for any student who wants to experience a collaborative writing experience in the language he/she is studying.
• Esl Websites, i.e. websites where language learning students can find different kinds of language activities, such as reading tests and comprehension questions, grammar exercises, pronunciation exercises, vocabulary exercises, etc.

Links

• Wikipedia: Website definition

References

• Felix, Uschi,[ http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=108931 The web as a vehicle for constructivist approaches in language teaching]
• Paulsen, Janice B., [ http://www.imej.wfu.edu/articles/2001/1/05/printver.asp New Era Trends And Technologies in Foreign Language Learning: An Annotated Bibliography]
• Singhal, Meena, The Internet and Foreign Language Education: Benefits and Challenges