Building a Web Site for Beginning ESL Writers
Timothy Healy
Seattle Pacific University
This paper describes building a website for beginning English as a Second
Language students at a community college. For students, the website
is a motivator to write and a means of learning basic computer and Internet
skills. For instructors, building the website is a means of learning-by-doing.
Introduction
Teachers of language now use web sites as tools in promoting their students
learning, and the literature offers many examples of the pedagogical
applications of web sites for various stages of learners. This is a
description of the building of a web site for a community college class
of beginning ESL students who are beyond literacy stage. It includes
a description of the class and the site, the objectives of the project,
and suggestions for those who would want to build a class web site for
the first time.
Description of the class and site
The project is a collaborative effort led by the two instructors of
an ESL class at Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Washington,
and myself. None of us have previous experience in building and managing
an operational web site. The class is composed of nineteen adult immigrant
learners from eleven countries. It is one-college year in length and
meets four times a week for two hours at a time. The building of the
web site has three fundamental objectives: to encourage students to
write, to teach them basic computer and Internet skills, and for the
instructors to learn the basics of web design. The current site is composed
of a homepage with links to five pages on which each student has a space,
and an instructor’s page. Each student space has a picture of
the student and a text describing that student, which was written by
another student in the class. It is posted on the college’s server.
Student learning
We believe that a web site can be an effective tool for motivating students
to write and learn basic computer and Internet skills. A web site can
add purpose to writing activities by encouraging students to see their
work as content to be put into type form and published for an audience
(Bicknell 1999, p. 21). It can also promote the communicative purpose
of writing and weaken any tendencies students may have to view a writing
assignment as simply class work. That is, something to be completed
only for the purpose of demonstrating proficiency or of meeting the
minimum requirements for credit.
A web site can promote self-confidence by showing students their work
in published format alongside that of their peers and by facilitating
their ability to share it with others. Students can quickly and easily
see the work of their peers by navigating the links of the site.
Once we post student work to the site, students need to know how to
access it in order to see its finished form. To access the site on their
own, they must be able to operate a web browser program and possess
some keyboarding and mouse skills. We believe the site gives them a
reason to learn these skills. We, or their peers, show those students
who need these skills how to access the site. Once in the site and linked
to the World Wide Web, they navigate its pages and empirically learn
these basic Internet and computer skills, as well as what web sites
and web pages are.
As a creation and expression of each and all students, we think a web
site can reinforce the bonds of classroom community that encourage students
to trust each other, potentially making it easier and more rewarding
for them to express themselves in writing. A web site is an extension
and reflection of the classroom. Like attending a class together, its
creation and exploration is a shared experience. No student goes before
the potential audience alone. A class web site belongs to the students
as a class, and the content the students write reflects on the class,
as well as the individual students.
Instructor learning
For instructors, building a web site can be a means of learning-by-doing.
Teaching a classroom of learners provides us with meaningful content
as well as a purpose for learning how to build a web site and use it
as a teaching and learning tool. In building a site we choose its content,
design, and the tools we need to build it. Then we build it.
We think it is appropriate that the instructors do the actual building
of the initial site for two reasons. First, we feel that the task of
building a web site in their ESL class is too great a challenge for
our beginning learners, due to their limited language proficiency and
limited computer and Internet skills. Second, completion of the task
is an opportunity for us as instructors to acquire basic web editing
and design skills for ourselves. Once we have these skills, along with
an understanding of some of the key issues of web design, we are equipped
to guide students in the building of sites. Further, as we develop our
skills and understandings, we can recognize segments of the web site
building task, which are appropriate for student involvement. For example,
having built our initial site and observed student interaction with
it, and having become confident in their basic understanding of what
a web page is, we see the upcoming revisions of our site as an opportunity
to guide the students in the tasks of designing their own page in the
site and writing and choosing content for it. Without the knowledge
and skills we acquired in building the initial site, we would not have
been able to confidently recognize this as appropriate for our students,
nor would we have been able to build the pages once designed.
Tools
In addition to an email account, an institution will often provide an
instructor with space on the server for a web site. Depending on the
capacity of the server and the demands of the users, an institution
may choose to limit this space. Bellevue Community College, at this
time, does not limit the space it provides each instructor.
Instructors, who have basic word-processing skills and can operate a
mouse, but do not have knowledge of HTML code, can, with the help of
a web-editing program, build and manage a web site. Microsoft’s
FrontPage and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver are two widely used web-editing
programs. We use Dreamweaver. The server of an institution should support
any web-editing program, but the institution may be able to offer a
certain one for free, or at a reduced price owing to any software agreements
it may have with a certain supplier. Basic photo-editing software such
as those which come with the purchase of a digital camera are sufficient
for adding image content to our page.
We can learn the technical requirements of web-design sufficient for
our purposes by completing program tutorials and by following the instructions
in the “Help” menu of these web-editing programs. To become
familiar with the theoretical aspects of design we can look to the literature
on basic web design. The institution’s Webmaster is another source
of expertise in site design and management. Making the acquaintance
of the Webmaster early in a project is recommended.
Content
The Webmaster of an institution can also supply any support and/or requirements
for a site to be posted on the institution’s server. For instance,
educational institutions often have acceptable use policies and design
guidelines for any material posted to their server. An institution,
as Bellevue Community College does, may require the inclusion in a site
of certain items of content, such as a college disclaimer of responsibility
for the content of the page and alternative text descriptions for all
images. Alternative text images are displayed in the spaces where we
place any images in our site when a browser cannot, or is not set to
support the display of those images. They describe the content of the
image in text. These descriptions are consistent with Bellevue Community
College’s interest in making the content on its server as broadly
accessible as possible. A common institutional prohibition is the use
of an instructor’s space on the server for commercial purposes.
As regards including students’ pictures in our site, we are required
to have their written permission. We currently type the finished work
of our students in preparation for posting.
Design
The purpose of our sight guides us through the design and revision processes.
For example, we included portraits of the students to serve several
of our learning objectives. We feel the images reflect the visual reality
of the classroom and foster the view of the space on the site as an
extension of students’ identities. They also serve as non-textual
visual markers that assist our beginning learners in navigating the
site. The editing and inclusion of images in web sites is also a basic
site-building skill that we as instructors want to learn. Thus posting
student portraits also serves our learning objective of becoming proficient
in web site design by giving us the opportunity to learn by doing.
HTML code, or Hyper Text Markup Language is the textual foundation of
a web page. It is a series of tags that define the appearance of a web
page. A web browser reads HTML tags and displays the text and images
per their instructions. We can hand-code our site, that is we can use
the keyboard to write HTML code as we would compose a document in a
word-processing program, and we can use a web-editing program to compose
a document as it should look in a browser, and the program generates
the necessary code for us. For novice web site builders, using a web-editing
program has its advantages. It allows us to use the point-and-click
method to create pages quickly, and it also offers the option of hand
coding. Significantly, a web-editor is designed to facilitate the editing,
uploading, and management of a site, not just its composition. These
are necessary functions for making a site operational and integral to
our class.
It is useful, however, to have some knowledge of hand coding for the
following reasons. By composing code we can familiarize ourselves with
how HTML tags work, and learn some tags. Knowing some tags we can better
read HTML code, which helps us identify occasional code errors, and
potentially, to fix them, and knowing some code can help us better appreciate
what a web-editor can do for us. Again, if we choose to, we can write
our own HTML code in a web-editing program.
Conclusion
Today, many ESL students have Internet and web-editing skills equal
to and superior to those that we are acquiring through this project.
As conceptions of literacy change to include computer skills (Bicknell
1999, p. 21), we can expect that our students will suggest web publishing
as a natural component of writing tasks. Such a project as this can
serve to help instructors keep up with the literacy skills of these
students and to satisfy their expectations for becoming literate in
English. With the computer and Internet resources available to us today
at our institutions we feel we have no excuse for not being capable
of meeting their expectations.
Our web site building project is a work in progress. As we make it operational
and observe the ways our students interact with it, we can receive insight
into both its potential and its shortcomings. With each revision we
can incorporate into it the knowledge we gain from this interaction
and from our further review of the literature and the expertise of our
colleagues and other web professionals. Ultimately, we can apply the
basic web site-building skills we learn as instructors in building and
applying a web site for beginning level students to guiding more proficient
students in the design and creation of their own web sites. The project
that has been described here serves the purpose of helping us develop
these skills while promoting the development of our students’
writing skills. The URL for the Bellevue Community College ESL 012 web
site is: http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/gtemplin/index.htm.
References
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Castro, Elizabeth. (2000). HTML for the World Wide Web, Fourth Edition:
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Kelly, C. (2000). Guidelines for designing a good web site for ESL students.
The Internet TESOL Journal, 6 (3), http://itesl.org/Articles/Kelly-Guidelines.html
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