Customer Reviews

Internet English: Www-Based Communication Activities

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With great excitement, I bought the first book (to my knowledge) to teach English through the Internet. However, after reviewing both the workbook and the teacher's manual, serious flaws begin to appear. Most puzzling to me are the first four chapters. They teach students how to use basic Internet functions like e-mail and search engines. However, the language required to understand these instructions is far more difficult than the language actually taught in later chapters.

The rest of the book is also puzzling. You don't need the Internet to do most of the exercises, and most of the topics are fairly bland and very limiting ("Find a review of your favorite movie on the Internet. What does it say?") This has almost nothing to do with language, in my opinion, other than hitting "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v" and "ctrl-p" to print out the review nicely.

As a last kick in the rear, an appendix is devoted to teaching how to do html programming. What has this to do with language at all? There are tons of authoring tools that take care of the programming for students.

Students aren't dumb, they probably know how to use the basic Internet functions. If they are dumb, they couldn't understand the first 4 chapters anyway without doing the rest of the book first (which would be impossible without knowing how to do the first 4 tasks) yadda yadda.

While it is a commendable attempt, I think an English course based on the Internet should spend more time teaching language, not the Internet.

As an IT trainer, I found the most dificult barrier for People here in the Middle east is the English language chalenge. We have too much Internet cafes, but in my estimation, average people can't understand more than 30% of English. This is why I thought of a solution to author a book in called Internet English. The problem is that me also is not a native. This is why I found this book valuable when I suddenly found it at amazon.com. Brilliant Idea.