During the past seven months or so there have been almost no visible changes in flesl.net. Beneath the surface, however, progress has been made. I've learned enough about the technical side of website building to be able to make interactive pages, and also (I hope!) to be able to make better looking and therefore more useful pages.
One result of this work is the newly-designed home page—this page. The most important change is the addition of two scrolling boxes, one labelled "updates" and the other "suggestions and requests." The purpose of these boxes is to provide me with a direct and informal way of "speaking" to flesl.net users. I also hope that by placing these boxes as prominently as possible, by putting the right sort of content inside them, and by putting a contact e-mail address in each entry, I will encourage flesl.net users to speak to me.
The idea for the "updates" box is to announce there any additions of new material as well as any revisions or extensions of old material. I also intend to use it to "post" any news items that I happen to find which seem likely to be of particular interest to flesl.net users.
In the "suggestions and requests" box I will describe the material to be found in particular areas of flesl.net and make suggestions as to how that material might be used. From time to time, I will also, perhaps, use this box to talk about general theoretical issues ESL pedagogy. Whatever the subject matter of the entries in this box I will ask users to send in their responses ("feedback").
I may also use this box, from time to time, to solicit particular types of information from users: responses to a questionnaire for example, or samples of student work done on flesl.net "exercises" or "activities.
I will try to change the material in each of the boxes at least once a month and I will put any entries that seem worth preserving into an archive.
In the upper part of the page, there are fifteen colored boxes. The first twelve contain links to various "areas" of flesl.net. The "grammar" and "teaching" links go to newly designed directories which, at the moment list more or less the same materials as were listed in the former "grammar" and "tesl" directories. The "other readings" directory contains some readings that were formerly listed in the "annex" directory.
Six of the twenty second series, paired stories have an "annotated version." In these annotated versions, between twenty and thirty words and phrases are followed by a number in square brackets. These numbers are linked to a particular section of another page which contains the "grammar and meaning notes" for the story. Originally, I intended to provide an annotated version for each of the stories. However, this turned out to be extremely time-consuming and, more than a year ago, I put the project aside in order to be able to spend time on things that seemed more important.
I'm afraid that as well as having been neglected by me, the grammar and meaning notes have been more or less ignored by flesl.net users. Certainly I have not noticed many visits to these pages being recorded in the site statistics. This is unfortunate, I think, because even in their unfinished condition the notes contain quite a lot of potentially useful material. Perhaps things would be different if I had taken the trouble to make some suggestions about how the notes could be used. In any case, that's what I want to do here.
Teachers, I think, could best make use of the annotated versions and the notes by treating them as a handy source of grammatical and vocabulary points to mention during a classroom discussion of a particular reading.
For example, a teacher whose students had recently been working on the past perfect tense might decide to use the story, Gabriela Byrne. Before giving that story to his or her students, that teacher might glance at the annotated version and notice that note #19 concerned a verb phrase in the past perfect tense. Then, looking at this note ,that teacher might decide to mention this sentence in class, as a reminder of how the past perfect is formed and as a further example of how the tense is used.
To take another example, this one concerned with vocabulary. A teacher who had decided to use the story, Francis Bok, might look at the annotated version and see that note #2 explained the special use of the verb "raise" meaning "breed" or "grow." And that teacher might then decide to draw his or her students' attention to the contrast between the way the verb is used here and its most basic use
I should add that part of the original idea of the notes was that the grammatical, semantical, and rhetorical information used there would be linked to entries in the Grammar Glossary. Unfortunately, this idea was only put into practice for the grammar and meaning notes to Katharine Gun, and, there only for the first six entries.
I certainly intend, sooner or later, to get back to work on the grammar and meaning notes although, when I do, I will probably limit the number of notes to twenty or perhaps even fifteen per story. The question in my mind right now is just how high a priority I should give to this job; and one thing I obviously have to take into consideration in trying to answer that question is how important and useful flesl.net users think the notes are. I'm hoping that I will learn something about that by discussing the notes here and asking for "feedback" from flesl.net users. So please send comments, suggestions, and corrections concerning the grammar and meaning notes (or any other part of flesl.net) to the following address after first removing all the capital letters:
webmPLEASEaster@fleREMOVEsl.net
And here are links to all the annotated versions:
—fl, 07.11—