AN ONLINE NETWORK COMMODITY

Language Learning Online: Theory and Practice in the ESL and L2 Computer Classroom.
Swaffar, J., Romano, S., Markley, P., and Arens, K., 1998: Austin, Texas: Labyrinth Publications. $29.00

This book is a valuable resource for any person who wants a window into what happened in the 1990s with language teaching in the networked classroom/lab and specifically with computer-assisted classroom discussion (CACD).

So often colleagues are doing something innovative in their classrooms, but when asked to write up their experiences for a newsletter or newspaper, they are reluctant to do so for whatever reason. The authors have succeeded at this task by documenting the CACD experiences of colleagues, the majority teaching at the University of Texas, Austin.

One word of caution must be voiced before moving any further. If by "online" you thought this book would be primarily about using the Internet in the classroom or about offering language courses via the Internet, you may be somewhat disappointed. While many networked labs may have access to the Internet, many do not. The focus in this text is on the classroom/ lab and having students within that room communicate in writing by way of their computers. While many of the articles make passing reference to the Internet, only one article, that of Orlando R. Kelm discusses the applications of communicating with other students outside of the classroom.

Janet Swaffar, the first cited editor, provides a theoretical foundation and summary for this work in the first and last two articles. The remaining articles while including some review of the literature are more applied in nature sharing qualitative and quantitative data from their classes where students used computers to communicate with each other for the purpose of improving their writing skills. The software application that most of the authors were using was the InterChange function of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment software.

The basic message of this book is that computer-assisted classroom discussion enables students to have greater use of the language than in the traditional teacher-fronted classroom. Communicating in writing via computer reduced a variety of negative factors from the traditional classroom empowering students to take a greater role in online discussions. The increased input and output experienced by students did appear to strengthen students' ability to convey the intended meaning of their messages; however, errors in structure in general did not show as much improvement. Most of the articles discussed classes in which CACD had been used a number of times over a given semester.

This book is significant in that it documents an important stage at which discussion-oriented computer applications began to be integrated into ESL and second language course planning. For anyone seeking to better understand that integration, this book is highly recommended.

Thomas W. Ihde, Ph.D., Bilingual/ESL Graduate Program, William Paterson University, New Jersey.