Fall 1994

E-mail in the Language Course
Vanessa Karahalios, Department of Classics

I am currently teaching an evening course in Ancient Greek. While I am extremely pleased with the amount of work my students are devoting to this class and the progress they are making, one of my greatest obstacles in teaching this course is its very format: it meets only twice weekly for one and a half hours each time. Those of you familiar with teaching language courses (especially ones in which rigorous grammar reviews are necessary) might rightly recognize this situation as the kiss of death. Along with using various teaching techniques and incorporating as much drill-time and hands-on learning as possible, I have decided to monitor my students' progress outside our precious little classroom time by using e-mail.

The benefits of e-mail in this context are numerous. It has proven for me to be a flexible, practical, time saving, and informative guide. Students have access to me whenever they have a question; they don't have to wait until the next class session (which can be as long as four days) to get help. Most questions arise when students are doing homework on translation or composition exercises. Even the least talkative students in class contact me with good, thoughtful, well-articulated questions or "dilemmas," as they call them. If I feel that their questionsÄand my answersÄ would be of particular use to all the students, I forward the messages (with the questioner's name removed) to the rest of the class via a master list. This eliminates a lot of frustration when students studying alone encounter the same types of dilemmas as their classmates.

In turn, I get an amazing amount of feedback: I learn what sorts of problems individual students are encountering and can give them specific suggestions to improve their weak spots. If I sense from their questions that several students have similar problems, I know what types of review drills or group exercises to use, or when I might be going too rapidly or too slowly. I even get a better idea about how I might combine or pair students for "group exercises" because their e-mail messages clue me in on their strengths or weaknesses. In sum, I get a better sense of both the overall and individual aspects of the course. The best thing about e-mail is that it gives you instant feedback; I would have had to wait a lot longer had I relied only on the interaction and input two class periods a week could possibly provide me.