Teaching EFL/ESL Students How to Use Search Engines and Develop their English

In this article, I briefly explain the relationship between web searching and language knowledge and suggest that students’ problems may be caused as much by a lack of linguistic knowledge as by not knowing what to do. I then go on to present some classroom activities that help students learn how to use search engines and also develop a broader knowledge of English vocabulary.

Introduction

Search Engines

A useful definition of a search engine is given by Teeler & Gray (2000):

“a search tool that collects information from the Web by running an automatic program which visits huge numbers of web pages. It stores this information in a database and searches it by keyword when it receives your search request. It then provides you with a list of sites that include your keyword(s).” (p.105)

Language Knowledge and Web Searching

• Firstly, they tend not think about the topic in sufficient detail before conducting a search. As a result, they may not find sufficiently relevant results to their ‘searches’, leading to a feeling of frustration or despair. Students need help in using their existing vocabulary knowledge in the preparation of keywords, which can be used as ‘search terms’ about the topic.
• Secondly, my students sometimes find only limited information about the topic because the ‘keywords’ they use are different in structure to the ways in which English is typically structured. In order to develop awareness of this, I draw my students’ attention to the following aspects:

Word families: it is useful to know that ‘corrupt’ and ‘corruption’ are within the same family. Experimenting with these parts of speech will produce different results.
For example, ‘political + corrupt’ (8,282 web pages found) and ‘political corruption’ (17,616 web pages found).

Collocation: knowing which words go together may help students find relevant information. For example, “development and research”+”cars” (37,294 web pages found) compared to “research and development”+”cars” (65,383 web pages found).

Frequency: using a higher frequency word as a keyword may be easier to find information about the topic. For example, searching for ‘nuclear weapon’ (6,607 web pages found) instead of the more frequent ‘nuclear weapons’ (22,475 web pages found) produced different results.

All of the above examples were tested using the search engine Altavista. The activities in the next section are designed to provide guidance in how to use search engines and to develop awareness of English vocabulary.

Search and Language Activities

• Firstly, to learn how to find relevant web pages.
• Secondly, to find out if the information on these pages is relevant to the topic.

1. Search Activities

Information is available in different places on the Web and specified in many different ways, hence web searching requires a high degree of linguistic ingenuity at times. In order to locate relevant information, it is sometimes necessary to use more than one search engine. Each search engine operates in a slightly different way. Hence it is a good idea to refer to a website such as Search Engine Watch, which explains the particular characteristics of each search engine.

2. Selection Activities

3. Evaluation Activities

What follows is a sample of possible activities of each type, which can be completed during a series of lessons.

Search Activities

1. Which search engine should I use?
• Draw the students’ attention to the existence of search engines and demonstrate how they operate.
• Demonstrate a search using a ‘search engine’ such as Altavista and then carry out the same search with ‘metasearch engines’ (e.g. Dogpile), which do “not crawl the web compiling their own searchable databases. Instead, they search the databases of multiple sets of individual search engines simultaneously, from a single site and using the same interface for comparison” (Chamberlain, 2000). Explain that Dogpile does not use the word ‘search’ but follows the metaphor using the word ‘fetch’, which is useful language development.
• Give students a list of places or things to find on the Web. Ask students to compare how accurately each search engine responds to their search requests.
2. How specific should I make my search?
• Students should be encouraged not to type in general terms such as ‘tourism’ as keywords. Instead they should experiment with more specific keywords such as, ‘eco-tourism in Africa’.
• Encourage students to use inverted commas. For example, by placing the keywords “air pollution”+”cities” within inverted commas, the search engine will search for web pages containing both terms within the inverted commas together. This may produce a more focused list of results.
3. What should I type into the search box?
• First, ask students to think about a topic such as ‘Energy’.
• Students initially can form some questions about the topic and then draw a semantic map for it, which is “a visual framework of connections between ideas” (Nation 2001:128).
• Having done this, students can create keywords to put into the search engine. For example, they could search for: "non-renewable energy sources" or "renewable energy sources".
4. How can I find a wider range of web pages?
• If students are finding problems locating appropriate information, then they should experiment with the language by using synonyms and antonyms of their keywords e.g. "abundant energy sources" or "scarce energy sources".
• Encourage students to experiment with language.

Selection Activities

Ask students to carry out a search and then get them to look at the results and answer these questions:

• Are the titles of the web pages listed the same as your search words? If yes, the web page may be relevant.
• Does the description of the site include your search words? If yes, the web page may be relevant.
• Do you know where the web page is located? Is it from a private, commercial or academic website? Do you know which country the website is in?

Evaluation Activities

• What is the title of the web page you have chosen?
• Where are you in the website?
• Do you know who the author of the material is?
• Does the information appear to have come from primary or secondary sources?
• Are there links to other websites about the same subject?
• Is the information comprehensive?
• Is the information up-to-date?
• What is the style?
• Is it an academic article, a newspaper article, a company report, a company information page, a government information page, an advertisement or something else?

Conclusion

In the future, search engines may become more sophisticated at interpreting users’ requests. In the meantime, we must assume that the Web will continue to grow and the possibilities for finding information will become more difficult. We should continue to develop activities to help language learners learn to find information on the Web and at the same time broaden their knowledge of English.

References

• Chamberlain, E. (2000) Bare Bones 101: A Basic Tutorial on Searching the Web
  http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/bones.html
• Cooke, A. (1999) A guide to finding quality information on the Internet. London: Library Association Publishing.
• Kramsch, C. (1993) Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nation, P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Search Engine Watch
  http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
• Teeler, D. & Gray, P. (2000) How to use the Internet in ELT. Harlow: Pearson Education

Search Engines

• Altavista http://www.altavista.com/
• Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/
• Google http://www.google.com/