Assignment

Using email: issues
Below is a series of issues that might arise when using email with learners. Suggest a solution for each.
1. Your learners don’t have email accounts.
Help your learners to set up email accounts with a free web-based email such as Yahoo!
Or hotmail.
2. Your learners don’t know how to send or open attachments.
Provide your learners with some basic hands-on technical training in email use. This may or may not include covering areas such as virus protection or spam, depending on how much skill they already have.
3. Your learners use abbreviations such as CU (see you) or the lower case I in all their email.
Make your learners aware of issues of appropriacy and netiquette in email use. You could use task B above to do this.
4. You would like to provide your learners with a weekly emailed summary of classwork covered, but have no time to do so.
Encourage different learners to do this every week, and aware credit for it, or make it part of a portfolio assignment.
5. Your learners are reluctant to do the extra work that belonging to a class email discussion list involves, and do not contribute much.
Be prepared to drop an idea if learners are not convinced of its value. If out-of-class email activities do not work, try an in class email project such as a short information gathering activity, and be sure to discuss the benefits of such an activity with learners.
6. In a keypal project, your learners don’t know what to write to their partner in another country.
Provide a clear task with detailed gidelines. For lower-level learners, you could even provide a model email for learners to base their own emails on.
7. Your learners are upset by emails received from the partner country, as they find them rude or aggressive.
Discuss issue of intercultural communication with your learners, and how their own first language norms in writing compare with English. What are the different and similarities? How might this affect the partner country’s writing of emails? It’s a good idea to raise this issue in intercultural projects early on, so that learners are prepared for- and more tolerant of-differences in style and register.