FATMA ISMED12232K1.09CALL

Advantages of emails• Emails are easy to use. You can organize your daily correspondence,

send and receive electronic messages and save them on computers.

• Emails are fast. They are delivered at once around the world. No other form of written communication is as fast as an email.

• The language used in emails is simple and informal.

• When you reply to an email you can attach the original message so that when you answer the recipient knows what you are talking about. This is important if you get hundreds of emails a day.

• It is possible to send automated emails with a certain text. In such a way it is possible to tell the sender that you are on vacation. These emails are called auto responders.

• Emails do not use paper. They are environment friendly and save a lot of trees from being cut down.

• Emails can also have pictures in them. You can send birthday cards or newsletters as emails.

• Products can be advertised with emails. Companies can reach a lot of people and inform them in a short time.

Pedagogical Benefits of E-mail

1. Extends Language Learning Time and Place

As many researchers have noted, e-mail extends what one can do in the classroom, since it provides a venue for meeting and communicating in the foreign language outside of class. Because of the nature of e-mail, FL learners do not have to be in a specific classroom at a particular time of day in order to communicate with others in the foreign language.

2. Expands Topics Beyond Classroom-based Ones.Language teachers often have to follow a rigorous schedule in terms of content and/or grammatical topics to be presented and practiced in a semester or marking period. Large chunks of time can rarely be spared for free communication. E-mail gives learners an additional context for discussion that can be -- but does not necessarily have to be -- linked to topics being covered in class.

3. Promotes Student-centered Language LearningE-mail allows for communication between students in a context where the teacher's role is no longer at the center (Patrikis, 1995). In e-mail communication, FL learners can experience increased control over their own learning, since they can choose the topic and change the direction of the discussion. The end goal is to communicate with another person in the FL rather than to produce a mistake-free composition.

4. Encourages Equal Opportunity ParticipationBeauvois (1997) reported that computer-mediated communication increased total class participation to 100%. Others have noted that students reticent to speak in face-to-face contexts are more willing to participate in the electronic context (Beauvois, 1995; González-Bueno, 1998; Warschauer, 1995).

5. Connects Speakers Quickly and CheaplyE-mail allows students to communicate with native speakers of the target language without the high cost of traveling abroad (Hedderich 1997; Roakes, 1998). Before the advent of the Internet, it was not possible to communicate so immediately and so frequently with native speakers or with other learners.

Online Dictionaries

1. Please go to the webpage Online Dictionaries and Pay particular attention to the following websites then find how they differ from other dictionary sites. List special features that each of these five sites has.

• - Answers.com• - Language Tools• - TheFreeDictionary.com• - OneLook Dictionary Search• - Dictionary.com

2. Did you notice that when you double-click any word on this page, you will get an instant definition of the word ?  Do you like this special feature? (Note: This feature is provided by TheFreeDictionary.com, check Option 1)

3. Now try this function: type a word you don't know in the look-up box below and then you can get its definition and much more.  Do you like this feature?

(Note: If you are interested in adding an online lookup box to your webpage, check the above webpages and then copy and paste the html codes that you want onto your web source page.)

4. You can also add "Word of the Day" (or other free content including "Quote of the Day", "Article of the Day", "This day in history", and "Today's Birthday" provided by TheFreeDictionary.com) to your webpage (check option 3).

5. As a web surfer, you can download a free online dictionary to your computer and use it at any time to help you find the meaning of unfamiliar words on the web.

- For example, you can download•

MSN Encarta Right-Click Dictionary

• TheFreeDictionary right-click add-on Dictionary

• CleverKeys for Windows (provides instant access to definitions at Dictionary.com, synonyms at Thesaurus.com)

• 1-Click AnswersTM for Windows

Thesaurus

• In a thesaurus, you will find synonyms for words.

• First, you look up the word in the thesaurus. Next to the word you will find a list of words that mean the same things as the word you looked up.

• Like wonderful –great, magnificent, excellent, terrific, cool, and fantastic

• Also in a thesaurus you will find an antonym for the word. Like horrible or awful would be an antonym for wonderful.

Concordance and Corpus

•  A concordance is an alphabetical listing/index of the words in a text, given together with the contexts in which they appear.

•  A concordancer is a computer program that allows users to search a collection of authentic texts (i.e. a corpus) for multiple examples of selected words or phrases.

•  A corpus is a collection of either written or spoken texts (The plural is corpora). In fact, the World Wide Web itself is a huge corpus that we can take advantage of to find sufficient occurrences of language elements.

Uses of concordancers for language learning and

teaching:•  Users can use a concordancer to find examples of

authentic usage to demonstrate word collocations, word usage, or even the structure of a text.

•  Teachers can generate exercises (e.g., cloze tests) based on authentic, interesting examples drawn from a variety of corpora rather than made-up traditional grammar examples.

•  Students can work out rules of grammar or usage and lexical features for themselves by searching for key words in context. This helps them to raise their language awareness, particularly in word collocations.

Encyclopedia

• Why do we use encyclopedias? An encyclopedia is used when someone

wants to find information about a person, place, or thing.

e.g; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia

(the free encyclopedia)