One advantage of the Word Wide Web is the great wealth of culturally authentic documents it makes available to us and our students. They're almost always up to date, and we don't have to go to another country to find them.
Foreign language teachers at the Techology Workshop of the Summer Institute of the California Foreign Language Project created the following activities--using web pages--for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. They are excellent examples of the kinds of activities you can create for your own classroom. Simply browse web sites until you find one that is suitable in level and content for a classroom activity, and then write the activity that corresponds to the site, using the following as a model.
The activities for beginning level students might of particular interest:
Movies
in Madrid
El Bosque
Lluvioso
Presentaciones
de Danza en la Ciudad de Mexico
Frequently, because of the difficulty of getting appropriate reading materials for beginning level students, the students are given reading tasks that are too difficult or not given reading practice at all. However, these activities, using authentic documents on the web, are designed to help provide students with foreign-language reading strategies. Each activity begins with pre-reading strategies and prediction, followed by skimming the passage, finding cognates and context for unfamiliar words, and then a careful reading of the entire passage. Finally, each activity culminates by asking the students to apply what they have read. For more discussion and explanation of these reading strategies, read Reading Strategies for Web Activities.
Where can you find sites to write your own activities?
1. Use a search engine. Be sure that the search words are in your target language. Some possible search engines are:
Google
http://www.google.com/
Alta Vista
http://www.altavista.com
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com
2. Try sites with foreign-language links. These might include:
Language Links, Univ. Wisconsin
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/lss/lang/langlink.html
Elsie's Bookmarks Language Center
http://LanguageCenter.cla.umn.edu/lc/surfing/spanish.html
French Links - TBob
http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html
FLTeach Web Page
http://www.cortland.edu/www/flteach/flteach.html
This page was prepared by Lewis Johnson. If you have questions or comments, please e-mail me at lewis_johnson@eee.org