The role of WeQuests in learning a foreign/second language?

 

 

 A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. The model was developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium.

 Web Quests help students meet standards focused on critical-thinking and analysis skills, and may be particularly useful for social studies and science.Students using web quest in the classroom will be an interactive class. Students will work on groups, asking each other, helping each other, searching, finding information with each other. It will be a group class which is full of energy and eager to learn. Webquests foster cooperative learning through guided discovery, they do not generally provide a means for the individual practice of communication skills.It can be used to develop critical thinking skills among students to learn foreign language. Also, It can promote critical thinking because it requires each member of the group to carry out a specific, meaningful role, and then pool their respective research findings to formulate a response to a complex, open-ended problem. It can be multiple solutions to the problem in a Webquest.

A good Webquest focuses on an issue that has multiple viewpoints, such as social, political, environmental, or health-related. It also requires more than information gathering; students must process the information in order to form their opinions. It help students to develop higher cognitive thinking by requiring students to sift through extensive information from the Web until they can construct an understanding that not only connects to their schema, but also builds new knowledge .

Finally, as a teacher I will use webquest in my classroom to my students. Using this website will teach them a lot of thing. They will learn how to work on a group work, how to communicate with their friends even if they did not a close friend, how to deal with others. It will give them a chance to work on different web site and choose the topics they prefer. They also can express their opinion and information. It will give them a confidence to develop their own personality.