LET: The Treasure Hunt Club

Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
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Hello and welcome back. This month's topic is speaking. At first thought,
using the web to teach speaking sounds like a case of the wrong tool for
the job. Most speaking textbooks rely heavily on dialogues and other
written or audio examples of spoken language. And we all know that
Speaking class should give students a chance to be exposed to the
discourse, grammar and vocabulary of the spoken language; it should give
them some guidance in making the sounds of the language; and above all,
it should give students opportunities to speak, to try to make their own
meaning, and to gain fluency. So what can the web do? Well, the web can
be a rich resource for materials for speaking. It can help give students
content to talk about. This content can then be used to allow for
practice with the vocabulary, grammar and discourse that we are teaching.
It can also be a source of pronunciation practice for students, and
materials to help teachers with pronunciation training in class.

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Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
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Hello again! I hope you all had a nice relaxing holiday (or a productive
holiday!). With Golden Week behind us, it is usually a time of year to
look forward and I had planned to move on to our next skill area
(speaking) this month. However, a couple of really great listening sites
were introduced to me recently and so I thought I would go back and do
another column on listening.

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Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
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Hi and welcome to another issue of the Treasure Hunt. As promised, we
will continue with our look at using web sites for building individual
English skills. Last month we looked at listening, and this month we’ll
take a look at reading. To be very honest with you, I feel that great
care needs to be taken when using the Internet as a means to teach
reading. Using materials taken from the Internet can be highly
motivational: a teacher can find authentic examples of language for any
area of interest. And this combination of interesting topics and
authenticity is very powerful and very important for learners to be
exposed to, especially as learners start to gain proficiency. However,
the vast majority of web sites are made for a specific function, and
that function is not teaching EFL students to read. Lower level readers
need support and language control if they are to learn, and no matter
what their level, no learner benefits from being overloaded with
incomprehensible language. For most learners, the intensive reading
textbooks they have already are challenging enough. A good intensive
reading textbook, along with an organized program of graded readers for
extensive reading, is the best approach to teaching reading usually.
Short examples of language taken from the Internet can then be used to
increase motivation and interest.

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Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
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Hi everyone. Welcome back. Before we get started with a look at sites
that can be used for listening training, I have a few odds and ends that
I would like to go over.

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Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝□■
Hello. Welcome back to the Treasure Hunt Club. How did you manage with
the treasure hunt last time? The level of our example was probably a
little higher than most of our students can handle but with an
interesting site that is appropriate for your learners, this activity
can be a fun way to send them off into cyber space. Today we are going to
look at content sites one more time.

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