We are in high-season TEFL in the UK at present, which means that many of us feel as if we are performing a high-wire juggling act, with one moment a bunch of teenagers (Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, whatever) facing us and the next moment senior business clients, again from any part of the globe, sometimes in intensive one-to-one classes for almost eight hours a week.
This week I have been in the Multinational Teenage Zone and just as I was reeling from trying to learn yet another bunch of facial expressions plus associated names (my particular weak point) that will mostly disappear from my life totally within the next fourteen days I received notification of a package to be picked up from the local DHL office. When I finally retrieved my package it turned out to be a number of books concerned with teaching Business English that I had been sent for free due to the fact that I had attended the IATEFL Conference this year. (One of the big advantages of attending that conference, apart from the stimulation and the fun of the event, is the number of very good free books that, if you are in the right spot at the right time, you can acquire.)
One of the good books that I discovered in my package from Pearson/Longman this week was “How to Teach Business English” by Evan Frendo. They dedicate a short section to Web quests, which is basically a way of getting learners to search for relevant information on the internet and then use it in a sensible way. In this book it is seen as one method of teaching Business English at a distance.
The British Council is also involved in defining the term, though their contributers, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly, use the one word term – Webquests.
I did a search on both “Web quest” and Webquest” and discovered that the latter is much more common on the internet, in fact it had more than three million hits on google.
Another site called teAchnology offers its own definition of a Web Quest – “a method used to engage students in inquiry based learning” and it offers Web Quest Generators for Cyber-Starters. My impression is that this particular Quest, though perhaps not as big as that for the Holy Grail, is pretty big out there in Cyberspace, but my real reason for Citing this Site (perhaps the start of a ditty there) is the wonderful connotation of an “Online Teacher Resource” that dares call itself teach-nology, or teAchnology, with a big bright green capital A just in case anyone forget the Aches and Pains, as well as the rewArds of course, that go along with teaching, particularly the teenage variety.
ETYM
Web – already covered on this blog, in particular under Webcaster.
Quest – a long and often difficult search.
In medieval times Malory wrote about the quest of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table to find the Holy Grail, which was renowned for its mystical qualities.
Quest – the term is popular in computer games. There are many games with Quest in the title including one called “Titan Quest”, but I expect my teenaged students could inform you better than me!
