236 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
Conventional CALL was difficult enough for many teachers. The
Web, for all its advantages, can be even more harrowing. What do
you do when the site around which you had planned your session
suddenly disappears? How can you keep your students learning
when the whole Internet slows to a crawl? How can you keep
control during an IRC [Internet Relay Chat] session? And what is
the best way of handling a student who covertly calls up the
Playboy site?Teachers, he suggests, need to learn search-engine skills, ways of
evaluating Web pages, techniques for manipulating and creating
their own Web materials, and methods of integrating Web activities
withtherestoftheirteaching.Andheaddsafurtherpoint:‘Teachers
need to learn new languages’ – by which he does not mean new
foreign languages, but the ‘language of the Internet’ – an essential
first step of familiarization with procedures and nomenclature.
The use of the Internet in foreign-language teaching may be
in its infancy, but it is plainly here to stay. Yet it already presents
teachers with fresh challenges. The difficulties noted in chapter 2,
arising out of the nature of the medium in conversation, apply
with greater force to foreign learners – the lack of intonational
cues, facial expressions, and so on. Also, teachers have to work out
ways of handling a new kind of difficulty – new, at least, in the
order of magnitude that it presents – namely, the fact that so much
of the native-speaker usage in chatgroups and virtual worlds is
non-standard, often ludic and highly deviant. The tolerance of ty-
pographical error, and the relaxation of the rules of spelling, punc-
tuation, and capitalization (p. 87), are not in themselves novelties
to learners, for the same flexibility doubtless exists in their own
mother-tongue Internet use. But foreign learners lack the intuitive
sense of the boundary between standard and non-standard, or a
sense of just how deviant a chatgroup usage might be, and by dint
of exposure to repeated instances they may well end up misusing
a construction, idiom, or other form. The bending and breaking
of rules, which is a hallmark of ludic linguistic behaviour,^19 always
(^19) Crystal (1998: ch. 1).