The Internet is an ocean full of English written information where you can develop your English—even by just surfing the web. All kinds of information written in English are useful for reading exercises and you can utilize a wide array of English audio materials from native speakers for listening practice. Also, online broadcast serviced in real-time helps you strengthen listening skills while enhancing speaking and writing skills by sending email, chatting online, or using the Internet phone.
However, significant limits still remain in utilizing this fantastic English learning tool in class and it’s not easy to find appropriate English teaching materials for students on the Internet. Besides, no specific method or research has been prepared yet on using the Internet for English teaching. Therefore, most teachers working in the field are not actually able to use the Internet for English teaching or are having a hard time, even if they can, due to their lack of knowledge on how to utilize it. We need to study and suggest specific plans for using the Internet to teach English in class. The following are the types and plans for teaching English utilizing real-time Internet.

1. Using E-mail
1) Real-time Communication between teachers and students
This method, which is best applied to a small group session, is recommended when you first introduce e-mail to students. Before proceeding with this interactive course, please note that you have to send short simple messages to draw instant response from students instead of giving them difficult tasks from the beginning.
2) Perfect Paragraph
Teachers prepare some sentences containing a couple of errors and send them to the groups of students. Then students find the errors and send them back to teachers. This activity continues until the students find all the errors.
3) Chain Stories or Sentences
Each student makes one story or sentence and passes it to their designated partners, who then add a story or sentence to it and pass it to the next person. When teachers get as many sentences as the number of students, they correct these sentences and students can develop their writing skill by comparing the corrected sentences with their original sentences. This type of practice is useful for middle-level students to learn grammar. Also, it helps high-level students write actual stories using expanded vocabulary and conjunctions.
4) Order of Sentences
Teachers send students some sentences in mixed order and students correct the order of the sentences by cutting them and pasting them in the correct order and sending them back to their teachers for evaluation.
5) Cloze exercises
In this exercise, students learn how to use adjectives, articles and vocabularies filling in the missing parts of the sentences.

2. Keypal Activity
For the first four weeks, students are grouped in teams of four members and learn how to open and use an email account (Hanmail). They are instructed to send email to other team members so that they can feel comfortable writing email. The students are encouraged to write email in English, if possible. The topics of the email are predetermined in group-discussions. A teacher provides appropriate resource materials that students can refer to. The students are instructed to print out and submit their email to the teacher. This activity promotes the use of email and English among students.
For the continued and interesting Keypal activity, students are given a table of exemplary Keypal topics and schedule as shown in table 1 and instructed to submit their own topics and schedules.

<Table 1> Keypal Topics and Schedule

■ List of the Keypal Sites
1) E-mail Pen-Pal Opportunities for Students : URL http://www.tesol.net/penpalpostings.html
2) Kidworld : URL http://www.bconnex.net/~kidworld/keypals4.htm
3) Dave's ESL E-mail Connection : URL http://www.eslcafe.com/
4) Keypals : URL http://www.reedbooks.com.au/heinemann/global1.html - keypal
5) Epals : URL http://www.britcoun.org.hk/epals_new.html
6) ExChange 3 : URL http://deil2.lang.uiuc.edu/ExChange3/pp.html
7) Cyberfriends : URL http://www.cyberfriends.com/

3. Problem-Solving Activity
1) Information Search
Students are given a lead for solving a specific problem and allowed to search related information on the Internet. Utilizing the Internet as a tool for study promotes a cross-subject learning environment in which students can naturally learn a lot of different things about a topic in a subject-independent way.
2) Sequential Creation
In a sequential creation activity, students create a poem, a short story, a picture, etc. by working together in a sequential way. For example, a teacher creates the first line of a poem about ‘world peace’ and passes it on to the students of another school or to the participating students worldwide on the Internet. They then continue to add the next line of the poem to the already existing line. This process is repeated until the poem is completed.
3) Parallel Problem Solving
The participating students on the Internet are given a common problem to solve. They then study about the problem individually and share their solutions or results later with other students.
4) Virtual Gathering
In a virtual gathering, teachers and students geographically separated worldwide participate in an Internet chatting activity and talk to each other in real time or discuss a given subject using email during a specific time period.
A teacher can set the topic of a discussion in advance, or students can determine and study the topic by themselves.

4. Study Project
In these days, many of the study activities on the Internet are carried out on a project basis. In a study project, students in each group set the goal, procedure, and expected duration of a project by themselves. Students use four different language functions, i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing to complete the project, during which they get to learn English in a natural way. They review the result of their project and correct any errors found before they submit it to the teacher. The submitted result is evaluated by the teacher and shared among the students.

▶Kyul-Sung Industrial High School, Sang-ryong Shim (soulshim@yahoo.co.kr)