As a teacher of ESL or another foreign language, you cannot ignore the potentials that the web offers in relation to teaching. These days, you can create interactive and multimedia-featured foreign language teaching materials that your students can use - either in or outside class. In the latter case, these materials would be of a complementary and/or supplementary nature and are not intended as a substitute for the standard teaching materials you are using in class.

The interactive and multimedia-featured materials you can create for the web may include activities covering all areas of language skills, tests, and even entire lessons following the traditional PPP approach (presentation-practice-production) or the ESA approach (engage -study - activate) within the general communicative language teaching framework followed as a general standard today.

What will you need to prepare such materials?

- First, you will need a written text, either authored by yourself or a third party. In the latter case, be sure you have the copyright holder's permission to use and publish the text in the web with your own material around such text later.

- Second, you will your own word processing software or an authoring software system to create your written activities, exercises, lessons etc. around such a text. Your material may include, among other things, maze, multiple choice and other exercises like crossword puzzles, gap filling exercises and more of all the usual activity forms so commonly used in ESL teaching.

- Third, you will need clipart and pictures to make your material look more fun and attractive and less boring. You should preferably stick to royalty-free materials, and there is a wealth of resources available in the internet.

- Fourth, you will need a high quality text-to-speech software with high quality speech engines available for the foreign language you are teaching. With this, you can create sound files and incorporate them in your material that will later be published in the web. Basically, you will need to set hyperlinks in the written material to associate the written passage with the respective sound file you have created. You also need to be aware what main variety of English you are teaching - US American or British English as this would determine the kind of language voice engine you will be using in your Text-to-Speech software (TTS). There are voice engines for British and American English, respectively, both commercial and free (e.g. from Open Source providers). In the selection of a TTS product, listen to voice samples first normally published on the provider's website to make sure that the voice does not sound too "computer-synthetic" but as natural as possible like a genuine human voice of a person who is a native speaker of that foreign language you are teaching. If you want to use texts in dialog form, you will need at least one female and one male voice engine for that language to assure the variation in speech sound you will need.

All these four components will make up your final lesson/activity/test product that now should be ready for publication in the web. Before putting all that online, make sure that hyperlinks work and that each each file required can be found in the respective folder where it belongs (for example, sound files in either *.wav or *.mpg file format will be normally included in a sub-folder entitled "sound", cliparts and pics in a sub-folder called "images", etc.). The actual *.htm file with all the written texts and hyperlinks are normally found in the root folder/directory .

OK, about now you should be done, and you are ready to use your ftp software to transfer all your materials to the host server that will be called when anyone - for example, your students - will access the site and the page under the known URL when connecting to the internet.

What I have outlined above is something you can follow to be as creative as possible according to your own special liking in the creation of such materials. I have always been enjoying this, and in our English Teacher training degree program we have included a special course module that is teaching our English teacher training students to do exactly that. I firmly believe that this is something that also should be included in other English teacher training programs. Such things are likely to make your own teaching more fruitful and rewarding.

Good luck with it!

The contributor is a Professor in Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching Methodology at a college at tertiary level in Nairobi, Kenya, and has been serving as a full-time volunteer in this non-profit project for the past 6 years. Dr. Turjakuunnen is a published author and has numerous books and articles in his fields of expertise to his credit.