Computers and foreign language teaching: an analysis of instructional websites

Abstract

This article has the aim of examining and reflecting on instructional activities for the development of reading and writing skills available in websites on the Internet that can be used in classrooms as supplement for teaching English language. Based on defined criteria by experts who study new technologies applied to education, we intended to evaluate the quality of instructional web materials. Twenty-five websites were selected in English, but only fifteen were analyzed in detail regarding reading and writing activities. The results reveal that there is no great variety of reading and writing activities in websites as well as there is no great difference between the proposed activities in educational websites and those introduced in printed textbooks.