ABSTRACT
Imagine you are Toshiko, an EFL teacher at a school in Japan where proficient speakers of English are not accessible to your class with any regularity. Having read papers and seen conference papers on using Web materials for providing authentic input in the classroom, you and your colleagues have decided to find some listening materials that would be good for adult learners. Your school has access to the Web so you agreed to find the first set—enough to get started with an additional listening activity each day for the next week. “Easy enough,” you think, as you turn to the Internet search engine, Google (www.google.com). When you start with a search for “listening,” you find that there are plenty of hits, actually 4,860,000. 1 Too many, so you narrow it down to “listening comprehension for ESL learners” (8,480 hits), and then to “listening comprehension activities for ESL learners” (5,850 hits), “listening comprehension activities” (462 hits), and finally “ESL listening comprehension” (41 hits). You spend a couple of hours investigating most of the 41 sites, finding several that seem to fit your need, and then develop a one-page handout to guide the learners through the use of the materials on each site. When the time comes to use the task, you invite two of the other teachers so they can see how it works. The students call up the browser, and type in the address as described on the handout. But within moments confusion breaks out in the lab as each student sees an error message on his or her screen indicating that the plug-in is missing.
