Interactive Language Learning on the Web SALLY MORRISON, ERIC CLEARINGHOUSE ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

The wealth of information available on the Web affords teachers and learners access to language learning resources like never before. Online journals, listservs, newspapers, and magazines provide authentic mate-rial for language learners, while teachers can find lesson plans and ideas, exercises, assessment tools, and other materials for use in their classes. The World Wide Web’s capability for interactivity makes it especially exciting as a resource for language teaching and learning. Online lan-guage tutorials, exercises, and tests are available to anyone who has ac-cess to the Web. This accessibility makes Web-based language learning activities quite attractive to both instructors and learners. Teachers can even create their own interactive language learning activities on the Web, which allows them to tailor the activities to suit their own courses and students. This digest discusses some of the advantages and challenges for teach-ers who want to design their own interactive Web-based language learn-ing activities, describes some of the activities produced by language teachers that are already available on the Web, and provides guidelines and resources to help teachers create Web-based activities of their own. Why Create Your Own Web-Based Language Learning Activities? A quick search of the Web for interactive language learning activities will yield hundreds of online exercises, lessons, games, and quizzes in many different languages. Although using previously made activities is tempting, there are many advantages to creating your own interactive language learning activities for the Web. These advantages include acces-sibility, renewability, and adaptability. Accessibility: By putting course material on the Web, teachers provide students with 24-hour, independent access to course information, and updates to Web pages and new assignments are immediately available to students. Renewability: Once created, materials can be updated easily and often. Adaptability: Web-based activities can easily be modified to support students at different proficiency levels or with special needs