Immilabour : the validity of an online language course in helping immigrants to integrate in Malta

Abstract

Online teaching is a relatively new field of research, but one which is fast evolving especially since several schools, mainly foreign universities and schools of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), are now moving towards the direction of distance and blended learning more than ever before. This idea is currently being explored in Malta as well. However, in this case it is an initiative that is being explored by private companies and EFL schools. The necessity for having an alternative to the traditional and generally more expensive language stays became stronger than ever since the terms 'recession' and 'financial crisis' started to dominate every news bulletin all over the globe. The idea of online teaching refers to a situation in which the teacher and the students are not in the same room for the lesson to be held effectively, which implies that students can save up money on flights, accommodation and also the spending money that they normally would have to fork out when staying in a foreign country. Immilabour is quite a casual form of online teaching in that its users do not have to pay to use it, however, it proved to be an excellent tool for testing the effectiveness of this modern-day way of teaching. This EU-funded project (Ref. Number ES/05/B/F/LA-149393) targeted prospective immigrants intending to move to Malta, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Romania. The website www .linguasnet.com has been designed to fulfil the informative and linguistic needs of these prospective immigrants. The linguistic section consists of the same language course at Beginner to Elementary level in four different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), whereas the social section includes social information about the five countries. The quantitative phase of this study consisted of data collected from Google Analytics, which is a tool that gives the opportunity to any researcher to monitor the web traffic on their site. This also helps to indicate where the traffic on their site is being diverted from. The sample in this section of the research was made up of all the people who visited the lmmilabour website at any point ever since its launch in September 2008. Registered users came from all over the world, mainly from France, Spain, China, Brazil and Romania. The data obtained in this phase proved that despite the initial hypothesis that the Portuguese and Romanian versions would be more popular than the English and Spanish versions from a linguistic point of view, the conclusions that were drawn from this study were quite different. hi fact, the English version of the website was, by far, the most popular out of the four. The second phase of this research consisted of a qualitative study and the participants were divided into two main categories. On one hand there were the students who were attending a course of English as a Foreign Language at Elanguest English Language school during the period in which the data was being collected, and on the other hand there were those participants who were contacted via e-mail or other social networking websites (such as facebook) and who expressed an interest in taking part in this study. The questionnaire that was used in this section was made up of a total of eighteen questions, some of which were open ended and others which were close-ended. One of the main findings that were obtained was in relation to the five sections which make up the language course on the lmmilabour website. The vast majority of the participants in the qualitative study chose the 'Listen and Repeat' section as their favourite, stating that it helped them a lot with their pronunciation of basic expressions and vocabulary items. This project is currently being revised by all the partners to get rid of any technical and linguistic problems which the units in the course might still have. There is also the possibility that it will he translated into other languages in future. On a larger scale, nowadays there are several systems and platforms which claim to make online teaching feasible. However, the general feeling towards distance learning is still quite lukewarm. Despite modem-day technology which has given institutions and individuals the option to start teaching via the internet there is still the underlying notion that it cannot be done as effectively as face to face teaching and learning.