Incorporating keypals, the newly coined term for pen pals who write to each other via a keyboard rather than the traditional pencil-and-paper route, is becoming a popular motivational option for teachers around the world. Students in Italy and Canada can exchange messages through online chat or email. While exploring the opportunities, I found two major sites that offer support for teachers who wish to engage their students in cross-cultural dialogue or, in the language classroom, practice their newly acquired writing skills as they communicate with native speakers of the target language.
The first site, ePals, was designed for K-12 teachers. It can be found at the time of writing at:
http://www.epals.com/#!/main
Keypal websites seem to be especially prone to change and deletion so it is always best to check the link before starting any lesson planning. Of the dozen or so links I found on the original webpage posted by Thomas Robb at Kyoto Sangyo University, http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/keypals.html , only two were active at the time of writing.
The second site offers much more for teachers than links to potential pen pals for their students.
ESL Teachers Board
http://www.eslteachersboard.com
The link for pen pals is located at the very bottom of the column on the far left labeled “ESL Teachers”. Clicking on this link leads to a discussion board where teachers and individual students may post “want ads”. Mr.Robb, mentioned earlier, suggests that teachers find 2-3 potential pen pals for each student so that in the case of one or two of the students in the partner class turn out to be non-responders, the teacher still has a back-up. He offers further practical advice in implementing a keypal program and communicating with the partner class. The following material is taken directly from his website.
Understanding The Other Class's Expectations
Be sure that you and your partner teacher(s) mutually understand:
Teach them: 1) the technical skills required for e-mail exchange, and 2) the language skills required for effective communication
Before your students send their first letter abroad, have them practice by sending messages to themselves.
Next, be sure to supply them a useful set of phrases for openings, closings and other functions. Students will need a few good models of complete messages so that they can observe the appearance of messages as a whole. Use these to point out the structural aspects of letters. Avoid the idea of supplying a simple template in which they fill in their own particulars since the students of the other class will then receive a full set of virtually identical letters! Multiple samples, or, at least, alternate phrasings will help.
Tracking Your Students
E-mail has at least one feature which can be challenging and perhaps frustrating to teachers: It's messy! The students have differing numbers of penpals and take differing amounts of time to read messages and create responses. This means either that some students may not complete their correspondence in the time allotted in class, or some students may complete it early and have nothing else to do. Time management thus can become a problem if there are not other activities to take up the slack, or if the slow students do not have access to the lab at other hours so that they can catch up.
Another management problem concerns the volume of correspondence and assigning a grade based on their performance. If the students are writing personal letters, you might not want them to submit copies of them to you as proof of their e-mail activity. You might, however, ask them to 'cc' you on at least their first letter so that you can see how well they do on this first, crucial message.
One solution is to the tracking problem is to have the students keep a log of their correspondence, perhaps with the following items to fill in per transmission:
Date From/To Sent/Rec'd Lines in Message Total Lines
(S/R) (without headers) To Date
You might also ask them to submit a single long file of all of their correspondence, after they have done through it can replaced any private sections with x's. How easy this is to do, however, depends on your particular configuration.
One additional benefit to the log is that it can be used for assessment as well, a grade being given based on the total lines sent and received. Students who write stimulating letters will most likely receive longer responses than those who write brief, uninteresting missives. Thus a combination of both sent & received messages tends to work well. (One of my students, however, received the full text of Hamlet by e-mail because his partner in Hong Kong thought that it would contribute to his line count!)
Tandem Learning While at first glance it might seem that native speakers would be the ideal choice for partners, consideration has to be given to what the other party would gain from the partnership. While your students' focus will most likely be on the language, correspondence with native partners will most often place your students considerably out of their depth. One way that NSs correspondence has been shown to work is with tandem' pairings, where both partners are seeking help in learning the other's native language. See the following URL for further details.
Learning in tandem is a form of open learning, where people with different native languages work together in pairs in order
to learn each other's language.
to learn more about their partner and his culture.
to exchange knowledge - e.g. about their professions.
http://www.slf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/email/infen.html
The Tandem project even has suggested activities, which can be accessed from the following menu on their home page.
Activity Groups:
I was unable to locate the article cited on the webpage but for those who are more dedicated to database searches, I am providing the following citation.
Foreign Language Notes (Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey), Vol 38, No. 3, pp 8-10, Fall 1996.
The first site, ePals, was designed for K-12 teachers. It can be found at the time of writing at:
http://www.epals.com/#!/main
Keypal websites seem to be especially prone to change and deletion so it is always best to check the link before starting any lesson planning. Of the dozen or so links I found on the original webpage posted by Thomas Robb at Kyoto Sangyo University, http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/keypals.html , only two were active at the time of writing.
The second site offers much more for teachers than links to potential pen pals for their students.
ESL Teachers Board
http://www.eslteachersboard.com
The link for pen pals is located at the very bottom of the column on the far left labeled “ESL Teachers”. Clicking on this link leads to a discussion board where teachers and individual students may post “want ads”. Mr.Robb, mentioned earlier, suggests that teachers find 2-3 potential pen pals for each student so that in the case of one or two of the students in the partner class turn out to be non-responders, the teacher still has a back-up. He offers further practical advice in implementing a keypal program and communicating with the partner class. The following material is taken directly from his website.
Understanding The Other Class's Expectations
Be sure that you and your partner teacher(s) mutually understand:
- how each teacher plans to integrate the keypal relationship into his/her own curriculum. Is it a just an 'add-on' activity or is at an integral part of the course?
- how frequent the correspondence will be and of what general length.
- how the students' participation will be evaluated. Both teachers should be placing similar weight on the keypal project since this strongly affects the frequency and quality of the correspondence. If a mismatch occurs, students who are depending on the e-mail might be disappointed.
Teach them: 1) the technical skills required for e-mail exchange, and 2) the language skills required for effective communication
Before your students send their first letter abroad, have them practice by sending messages to themselves.
Next, be sure to supply them a useful set of phrases for openings, closings and other functions. Students will need a few good models of complete messages so that they can observe the appearance of messages as a whole. Use these to point out the structural aspects of letters. Avoid the idea of supplying a simple template in which they fill in their own particulars since the students of the other class will then receive a full set of virtually identical letters! Multiple samples, or, at least, alternate phrasings will help.
Tracking Your Students
E-mail has at least one feature which can be challenging and perhaps frustrating to teachers: It's messy! The students have differing numbers of penpals and take differing amounts of time to read messages and create responses. This means either that some students may not complete their correspondence in the time allotted in class, or some students may complete it early and have nothing else to do. Time management thus can become a problem if there are not other activities to take up the slack, or if the slow students do not have access to the lab at other hours so that they can catch up.
Another management problem concerns the volume of correspondence and assigning a grade based on their performance. If the students are writing personal letters, you might not want them to submit copies of them to you as proof of their e-mail activity. You might, however, ask them to 'cc' you on at least their first letter so that you can see how well they do on this first, crucial message.
One solution is to the tracking problem is to have the students keep a log of their correspondence, perhaps with the following items to fill in per transmission:
Date From/To Sent/Rec'd Lines in Message Total Lines
(S/R) (without headers) To Date
You might also ask them to submit a single long file of all of their correspondence, after they have done through it can replaced any private sections with x's. How easy this is to do, however, depends on your particular configuration.
One additional benefit to the log is that it can be used for assessment as well, a grade being given based on the total lines sent and received. Students who write stimulating letters will most likely receive longer responses than those who write brief, uninteresting missives. Thus a combination of both sent & received messages tends to work well. (One of my students, however, received the full text of Hamlet by e-mail because his partner in Hong Kong thought that it would contribute to his line count!)
Tandem Learning While at first glance it might seem that native speakers would be the ideal choice for partners, consideration has to be given to what the other party would gain from the partnership. While your students' focus will most likely be on the language, correspondence with native partners will most often place your students considerably out of their depth. One way that NSs correspondence has been shown to work is with tandem' pairings, where both partners are seeking help in learning the other's native language. See the following URL for further details.
Learning in tandem is a form of open learning, where people with different native languages work together in pairs in order
to learn each other's language.
to learn more about their partner and his culture.
to exchange knowledge - e.g. about their professions.
http://www.slf.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/email/infen.html
The Tandem project even has suggested activities, which can be accessed from the following menu on their home page.
Activity Groups:
- Getting to know each other better
- Cultural differences and similarities
- This is what it's like in our country
- Studying and working in the two countries
- Points of view
- Making up stories
- Linguistic DIY
- More creative activities
- The art of good communication
- A mark of independance
- Simulation
I was unable to locate the article cited on the webpage but for those who are more dedicated to database searches, I am providing the following citation.
Foreign Language Notes (Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey), Vol 38, No. 3, pp 8-10, Fall 1996.