Because the World Wide Web has now become the major delivery medium for text, graphics, sound as well as video with thousands of businesses, universities, government departments and individuals setting up their own pages, it is an invaluable source of authentic materials for language teachers and learners. Although the World Wide Web was dominated by English-language Web sites in its early years, more and more material is being made available in other languages, including most, if not all, of the languages currently taught in universities throughout the UK. From the relative comfort of your computer you can access thousands of pages of text and graphics, and, if you have a computer with the right specification, sound and moving images from all over the world.

There are a number of particularly relevant activities for language teachers and learners possible on the World Wide Web:

Currently amongst the most popular browsers in UK universities, however, are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These browsers are much less sophisticated than Netscape Communicator but share the same basic principles. Your computer will probably already have a browser loaded on it and the icon for it will appear on the screen or in a folder as shown in the example below.

Web page locations often convey a lot about the site they have come from. We can work out a lot about their origins, authors and function from the component parts of the URL. Look at the following example:

Some URLs are more complicated and contain even more information as in the example below:

This may appear a little complicated but it will be useful to you later in the book when we talk about search skills (3.5).

You use this option essentially to open another Web browser so that you have two Web pages open at the same time. To do this you use the mouse to click on File, then on New Web Browser.

You can use the Edit option's sub-options to copy selected text from the current Web page for pasting into a word processed file of your own. To do this you must first highlight the text you want to copy. To do this, move the cursor to the beginning of the text you require and then, while holding down the left-hand button of the mouse, drag the mouse to the end of the text (this is known as `clicking and dragging'). You then click on Edit and then Copy. This will put the text into the clipboard, which is an invisible and temporary storage space for text, ready for pasting into a new document of your own making.

(For full details see 4.8)

The Bookmarks option offers you a way of taking the address of the current Web page and storing it in your bookmarks file on the local computer for easy recall later. If you have found a Web page you wish to bookmark, all you need to do is call the page onto your computer screen. Wait until the page has finished loading, then click Bookmarks and Add Bookmark. Whenever you want to access this page again all that is required is for you to click on Bookmarks and a drop-down menu of your selected pages will appear for you to click on.

This offers a relatively advanced set of preferences for tailoring your browser to your precise needs. The most useful of these is set your email address (under Mail and News Preferences) so that you can enjoy automatic emailing from Web pages and the Web page your computer automatically defaults to when started (under General Preferences).

If your computer is sufficiently powerful and you wish to make the most of your time, then you may have two or more search engines running simultaneously, each on a separate Web page. While you browse the search results of one, the other can be downloading Web pages onto your computer.

To do this click on File on the menu bar. Then select New Web Browser. When the new Web page has appeared on your screen, you must shrink it to reveal the earlier Web page which remains open in the background. To shrink the page you must click on the double-headed arrow (see below) in the right-hand corner at the very top of the browser's screen.

Using Edit, Copy and Paste in the location box lets you transfer URLs from the search engine results page onto the other open browser page. To go further with searching please see the section below on getting the most from the location box.

Another convenient way of finding Web sites of interest is to use a catalogue or directory-type structure like that offered by Yahoo. As there is no overall classification or indexing of the World Wide Web, many companies have stepped in to provide themed pathways through its chaos. When you access the Yahoo home page (a home page is the first page of a web site with menus and links to other related pages), you will find a set of hyperlinks arranged according to general categories. You can pursue your area of interest by a simple click of the mouse. For example, if you are interested in finding a Web site on Bologna in Italian, you might click on this pathway of hyperlinks:

With just this part of the URL showing (see below), press the ENTER key

Netscape will show you a list of all the files (or Web pages) in that directory on the server you are looking at. The listing will look something like this:

Notice that all the file names shown are underlined. This means that you can select any one of them by a single click and view that file. In fact, in our example, that one at the bottom of the list, called first.htm is probably the one we were looking for.