First of all, I would like to thank all the people and institutions that have fostered and supported the L'Aquila Action Project, making a great effort to cope with all the bureaucratic and complex organizational procedures that such a demanding initiative inevitably entails: the U.S. Department of State; TESOL-Italy's President, Ms Marina Morbiducci; TESOL-Italy's Executive Committee; the headmaster of the Dante Alighieri middle school in L'Aquila, Mr Giuliano Tomassi; the deputy headmistress of the Dante Alighieri middle school, Mrs Gabriella Befacchia; our contact teacher in L'Aquila, Mrs Claudia Valentini; and last but not least, all the colleagues of TESOL-Italy's local group in L'Aquila who have joined the language improvement course and the in-service training sessions. It was a real pleasure and honor for me to participate to the L'Aquila Action Project and share the spirit of solidarity that inspired it. Meeting the teachers from the heavily devastated areas of the earthquake was a touching experience, and therefore I would like to express my gratitude for having worked with them, because the simple fact that we had come together to focus on the latest trends in ELT, notwithstanding the extreme situation these colleagues have to face every day as human beings and professionals, shows how determined they are and willing to look ahead. This was a lesson for life that I will never forget. As regards the topic of this paper, it is basically the report of a two-hour presentation that I gave in L'Aquila on April 20, 2010, as part of the training program contained in the L'Aquila Action Project. It was the result of an ongoing individual research project called: "The convergence of English as a Lingua Franca and English as a Foreign Language, and its pedagogical implications", which is being carried out at the Dept. of Linguistics of the University of Roma Tre. I started my research from the assumption that the internet has become one of the authentic social environments where it is possible to observe the process whereby global communication favors the growth of substandard varieties of English. So, the framework of my study tends to combine a number of different approaches to EFL: from the Communicative Approach (Henry Widdowson), to studies on English as an International Language (Barbara Seidlhofer, Jennifer Jenkins, David Crystal, A. Suresh Kanagaraja), and finally to the recent Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (SCT) approaches (Steven Thorne, James P. Lantolf, Clare Kramsch). In a globalized world, the extreme heterogeneity of the growing population of net users is perhaps the most tangible manifestation of cross-cultural communication at work, and the pervasiveness of English as the primary contact language has given a strong impulse to the emergence and diffusion of its sub-standard varieties, a phenomenon that can be interpreted as the inevitable consequence of the non-native speakers' tendency to adapt the international language to their own linguistic and cultural identity, in order to fulfill their communicative needs. As Crystal (1997, 137) once noticed, people tend to use a distinctive accent and dialect to mark their own nationality on the world stage: These differences become especially noticeable in informal settings; for example they are currently well represented in discussion groups on the Internet. [...] International varieties thus express national identities, and are a way of reducing the conflict between intelligibility and identity. Thus, the aims of this paper are: 1. firstly, to show examples of the way in which the open-content access to the Web is significantly changing our approach to culture and literature; 2. secondly, to consider the pedagogical implications of using collective writing and fanfiction as language learning tools. Here is an overview of the related topics that I am going to take into consideration: • the advantages of Web 2.0 as regards hyperlinking and interactivity; • collective writing and fanfiction as forms of a new mythopoiesis; • ideas on the possibility of integrating fanculture into ELT.
Grazzi, E. (2010). The potential of Web 2.0 as a teaching/learning tool. In Anna Rosa Iraldo Marina Morbiducci Beth Anne Boyle (a cura di), L'Aquila Action Notebook (pp. 21-50). L'AQUILA : Arkhè.
The potential of Web 2.0 as a teaching/learning tool
GRAZZI, ENRICO
2010-01-01
Abstract
First of all, I would like to thank all the people and institutions that have fostered and supported the L'Aquila Action Project, making a great effort to cope with all the bureaucratic and complex organizational procedures that such a demanding initiative inevitably entails: the U.S. Department of State; TESOL-Italy's President, Ms Marina Morbiducci; TESOL-Italy's Executive Committee; the headmaster of the Dante Alighieri middle school in L'Aquila, Mr Giuliano Tomassi; the deputy headmistress of the Dante Alighieri middle school, Mrs Gabriella Befacchia; our contact teacher in L'Aquila, Mrs Claudia Valentini; and last but not least, all the colleagues of TESOL-Italy's local group in L'Aquila who have joined the language improvement course and the in-service training sessions. It was a real pleasure and honor for me to participate to the L'Aquila Action Project and share the spirit of solidarity that inspired it. Meeting the teachers from the heavily devastated areas of the earthquake was a touching experience, and therefore I would like to express my gratitude for having worked with them, because the simple fact that we had come together to focus on the latest trends in ELT, notwithstanding the extreme situation these colleagues have to face every day as human beings and professionals, shows how determined they are and willing to look ahead. This was a lesson for life that I will never forget. As regards the topic of this paper, it is basically the report of a two-hour presentation that I gave in L'Aquila on April 20, 2010, as part of the training program contained in the L'Aquila Action Project. It was the result of an ongoing individual research project called: "The convergence of English as a Lingua Franca and English as a Foreign Language, and its pedagogical implications", which is being carried out at the Dept. of Linguistics of the University of Roma Tre. I started my research from the assumption that the internet has become one of the authentic social environments where it is possible to observe the process whereby global communication favors the growth of substandard varieties of English. So, the framework of my study tends to combine a number of different approaches to EFL: from the Communicative Approach (Henry Widdowson), to studies on English as an International Language (Barbara Seidlhofer, Jennifer Jenkins, David Crystal, A. Suresh Kanagaraja), and finally to the recent Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (SCT) approaches (Steven Thorne, James P. Lantolf, Clare Kramsch). In a globalized world, the extreme heterogeneity of the growing population of net users is perhaps the most tangible manifestation of cross-cultural communication at work, and the pervasiveness of English as the primary contact language has given a strong impulse to the emergence and diffusion of its sub-standard varieties, a phenomenon that can be interpreted as the inevitable consequence of the non-native speakers' tendency to adapt the international language to their own linguistic and cultural identity, in order to fulfill their communicative needs. As Crystal (1997, 137) once noticed, people tend to use a distinctive accent and dialect to mark their own nationality on the world stage: These differences become especially noticeable in informal settings; for example they are currently well represented in discussion groups on the Internet. [...] International varieties thus express national identities, and are a way of reducing the conflict between intelligibility and identity. Thus, the aims of this paper are: 1. firstly, to show examples of the way in which the open-content access to the Web is significantly changing our approach to culture and literature; 2. secondly, to consider the pedagogical implications of using collective writing and fanfiction as language learning tools. Here is an overview of the related topics that I am going to take into consideration: • the advantages of Web 2.0 as regards hyperlinking and interactivity; • collective writing and fanfiction as forms of a new mythopoiesis; • ideas on the possibility of integrating fanculture into ELT.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
