Gateway to the Hispanic World La Puerta del Mundo Hispano
Creating a WWW Page in the Spanish Classroom
Cristina Poyatos Matas, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, Kessels Road, Brisbane,QLD 4111, Australia. Phone: (07) 38757264 Fax: (07) 38757730
Email: C.Matas@hum.gu.edu.au
Keywords:
WorldWideWeb, Language learning, Language teaching, Spanish, Higher Education, classroom negotiation, Hispanic WWW sites
Introduction
This poster describes a classroom project in which a group of learners studying Spanish has undertaken the development of a Spanish WWW page on the Hispanic World and the Spanish language. In this project the Word Wide Web was used as a tool to enhance student knowledge of the Hispanic cultures and societies on the Internet, and to provide a challenging and meaningful environment for students to further developand use their Spanish language skills.
Background
Mary and David had invited some friends over for dinner and they decided that they were going to offer them something with a different flavour, something with a Hispanic flavour!
It took them sometime to plan the dinner but after consulting a few cooking books, they decided to prepare: Gazpacho, as a starter, Burritos, as a main course, and Flan, as a dessert, and of course not forgetting the typical Hispanic drink Sangría.
They left early in the morning to do their grocery shopping, so they could have plenty of time to prepare dinner, and decided to go to the new hypermarket, just a few minutes away from their home, in order to get a wider choice of products. With the excitement, they forgot their shopping list, but they decided not to go back since they could remember the groceries that they wanted to buy.
When they got to the hypermarket, they started to walk around looking for their groceries and, trying to find these items, they spent some time in the music, sport and clothing sections of this new store. Without even realising it, they spent their whole dinner's budget, before even getting to the food section. As they didn't have much time or money left, for preparing their "Hispanic" dinner, they decided that frozen pizza and cheesecake would do for that night. Of course, with a bottle of red wine!
Their friends were not very impressed with the dinner that night, neither were Mary and David who felt disapointed at not having their planned Hispanic dinner.
The way in which Mary and David explored the Hypermarket is similar to the way in which many of us travel along the Super Highway.
There are a few lessons that Mary and David learnt from their experience in the Hypermarket and the unsuccessful Hispanic dinner, which promote to the effective use of the Highway of Knowledge as a learning and teaching resource in the foreign language classroom. These are:
- Shopping lists are important if you are going to the Hypermarket. Similarly, if you are going to use the Internet as a resource, learning tasks need to be very clearly defined in order to help students to have clear goals and to focus (Ramsden, 1995);
- If there is a Hispanic food section in the Hypermarket you should go directly. In the same way, using Internet sites structured according to the content relevant to a certain discipline or topic and with information on other relevant sites can save a lot of time and can assist students to complete their learning task focusing more efficiently in the discipline environment. In addition, the teacher can find this type of site more useful from the teaching point of view;
- It is important to focus on your shopping list otherwise you end up wasting your time and money and won't achieve your main aim. Using comprehensive and structured Internet sites related to a discipline, subject or topic in combination with clear learning tasks can help students to focus on task completion and avoid the danger of getting lost in the spiderlike network (Harasim, et.al, 1995) will decrease;
- It is important to go home once you have finished your shopping so you can concentrate on cooking your Hispanic dinner. If the Internet is used as a resource, students need to manage their time in such a way that they don't spent it all in the searching stage (shopping!) but they allow themselves time for task completion and reflection based on the information that they gathered from the Internet;
- A dinner is more enjoyable if you have prepared interesting food to share with your friends.The internet based learning activity should be followed by activities in class allowing time for the students to share and enjoy the outcomes of the learning activity with the rest of the class.
Having in mind the importance of comprehensive and structured Internet sites related to a discipline, we couldn't find any Hispanic internet sites which fully responded to our needs so we decided to create our own.
La puerta del Mundo Hispano is the result of a classroom project in which a group of fifteen Spanish students aimed:
- to create a comprehensive and structured internet catalogue to provide links to sites on the Hispanic world and the Spanish language on the net; and
- to provide information on the content of the different links and the language in which they were written (ie: Spanish or English).
The project took place in December 1995, in an Internet workshop in Spanish which was part of a Spanish intensive summer course at Griffith University.
The Participants
Co-authors of the different sections :
Amanda Ahern,
Christina Bryant,
Nick Byth,
Lisa Ferro,
Patrick Hafenstein,
Sarah Jon ,
Naoki Maniwa,
David Mead,
Andrew Millmore,
Cara Morey,
Victoria Rae,
Johannes Reiser,
Karen Rupherfoord,
Ayako Suzuki and
Akiko Yamsaki.
Technical Assistance: Paul Nielsen and Sarah Barry
Project Manager and Editor: Cristina Poyatos Matas
The Workshop
The workshop was divided into two stages. In the first stage, students became familiar with the Internet, Netscape and different Hispanic sites and audiences in the Internet through analysing the format and content of different Hispanic WWW sites.
In the second stage, the students named and developed in Spanish the format, structure and content of:
- the home page:La Puerta del Mundo Hispano;
- the Hispanic countries pages (eg: Argentina); and
- the thematic pages on the Hispanic world (eg: Press).
Students were grouped in different ways to enhance learning (Harasim, et al, 1995) according to the particular nature of the task in which they were involved and also to meet different learning styles (Ramsden, 1995 ).
For the development of the Home Page, the class was divided into four groups of students and they decided upon: the potential structure, content and title of the Spanish WWW page. At a later stage, the different groups made class presentations based on their ideas. Once all the groups had presented their outcomes, the whole class negotiated the title, content and structure, selecting the best ideas of each group. All the discussions took place in Spanish.
Once a template for the format, structure and content was decided with the whole class, the creation of the Hispanic countries pages were developed individually. They had to search and compile some of the existing sites on the selected country or countries. They also made comments on the content, quality and language of the different sites.
Finally, the creation of the thematic pages took place in small groups.
In this workshop students, were introduced to the concept of developing a WWW page and also to HTML language. Their final assessment items could be presented in any format from a word processing document (showing the format and concept of a WWW page) to a HTML document.
Outcomes of the Workshop
The result of this workshop was the creation of La puerta del Mundo Hispano. This Spanish WWW page gives the user the opportunity of finding information about the Hispanic world and Spanish language in Spanish. The different sections included in the home page are :
- Hispanic countries
- Spanish language and Literature
- Education
- Press
- History
- Art
- Music
- Job Search
- Food
- Tourism
- Economy and Politics
- Correspondence in Spanish. This Email section will allow the users to place their Spanish messages and exchange information on different topics related to the Hispanic world.
Assessment
Two items were used to evaluate students performance in this workshop:
- A small group item of assessment: the creation of a thematic page (eg: press, history, etc) on the Hispanic world.
- An individual item of assessment: the creation of one page on a Hispanic country.
Evaluation of the Workshop
The students participating in this workshop benefited at linguistic level from:
- Speaking in Spanish in small group negotiations and classroom presentations related to the content, structure and format of their group WWW page projects;
- Listening to the WWW page projects of the different groups and making decisions based on the input received;
- Reading authentic material available in Spanish on the Internet from the different Hispanic countries;
- Expanding their vocabulary through learning about lexical and linguistic models from the different Hispanic countries;
- Writing different WWW pages in Spanish and commenting on different links and locations for a real world wide audience .
- Improving their cultural awareness of the Hispanic world through the input received from different Hispanic countries.
In addition to further developing all their language learning skills, students benefited at technical level from:
- learning about the Internet, the World Wibe Web and Netscape as research tools;
- learning how to search for information using Netscape and the different searching engines;
- understanding the concepts involved in developing a WWW page (document etiquete, structure,format, etc.); and
- learning very briefly about how to create a WWW page with HTML.
Two students in the workshop managed to hand in their assessment items in HTML format. The rest of the documents were transformed into HTML format by Paul Nielsen.
The challenging task of developing a WWW page in the Spanish classroom was meaningful for the students and helped them to focus on task completion (Prabhu, 1990).
Problems Encountered
The time frame.
Breaking ice is always hard! It was not possible, in the planning stage to predict the amount of time that the completion of different tasks was going to take. Consequently, negotiation with students regarding changes in the assessment and content of the workshop was neccesary.
For future workshops La Puerta del Mundo Hispano will be a starting point and the time frame will be more realistic. It will also be an example of what can be achieved by students.
Fear of technology.
The majority of students was not familiar with the Internet and had never used Netscape. In addition, a few of them had never used a word processor. As a consequence, some of the students didn't feel very easy at the beginning about using the net as a resource to learn Spanish and about the Hispanic world.
In the future, this type of workshop can may be improved by introducing students to all the technological aspects of the workshop in English outside the Spanish classroom. Ideally this would be achieved by another person, not the Spanish teacher.
The language problem.
Having the menus of Netscape in English made it difficult to use Spanish at some stages, especially while explaining the use of this tool. In addition, a few Hispanic countries only had sites in English which made it more difficult for the students working on this countries to use Spanish all of the time.
In the future, some of the Hispanic countries which contain information only in English can be avoided although their sites should be researched before the workshop due to the increasing number of sites which are appearing in Spanish.
Conclusions and Future Plans
Creating a WWW page in Spanish as a language learning task was a challenging and meaningfull experience for the students.
La puerta del mundo hispano is the first Spanish WWW site created by Spanish students in the language classroom and it will be a valuable tool not only for Spanish students and teachers but also for native speakers.It provides a logical and comprehensive organisation of much of the current information available in the Internet on the Hispanic world and the Spanish language.
In addition, this page provides a channel for exchanging information and making friends in Spanish.
In the future, the page will be maintained and extended by a student editorial team and different learning activities and suggestions to use La Puerta del Mundo Hispano will be added in order to facilitate the use of this site by Spanish learners and teachers.
There is a lot of information available on the net and teacher and students will play a very important role into the future development of WWW pages. They will provide a meaningful and helpful resource for different learning programs in the same way that La Puerta del Mundo Hispano will be a valuable resource for many Spanish teaching programs around the world.
References
Prabhu,N.S. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Prabhu,N.S. (1990) Comments on Alan Beretta's "Attention to form or meaning? Error treatment in the Bangalore Project. In TESOL Quaterly, 24 (1), 112-115.
Harasim,L., Hiltz, S., Teles, L. and Turoff, M. (1995) Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ramsden, P. (1995) Reaching more students: Quality through diversity, in Reaching more students. Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane, Qld.
Many thanks to Paul Nielsen and Hellen Meade for their useful comments on this paper.
Copyright
Cristina Poyatos Matas ©, 1996. The author assigns to Southern Cross University
and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use
this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article
is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also
grants a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document
in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference
papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.
Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
AusWeb96 The Second Australian WorldWideWeb Conference
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