Untangling the Web: St. Martin's Guide to Language and Culture on the Internet by Carl S. Blyth (review)

these wonderful sources take a while to load, but they are in French. Many Languages http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/phf_es.htm This is a site of special interest culturally. We get a guided tour ofdie Vatican in any ofmany languages with options to read, for example, the biography of Juan Pablo II. With a click it can all be in English (or any ofa dozen other languages). There are many wonderful resources now. Send me your favorites and we'll help make them even more popular. Carl S. Blyth. Untangling the Web: St. Martins Guide to Language and Culture on the Internet. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 998. 1 5Op. Joseph Collentine Northern Arizona UNiVERSiT-Y It is momentous when a new medium becomes recognized as an acceptable tool for fostering foreign language (FL) acquisition. Such was the case in the 1980s with the creation ofvidéocassettes, which allowed for the effortless incorporation of television and cinematic productions into FL classrooms (Garza). The World Wide Web (WWW) is the latest medium to attract the attention of foreign-language pedagogues. Yet, the incorporation of the web into the FL classroom will not be as seamless as video has been, as the employment of the technology itself (i.e., the effective use ofrelevant software and hardware) requires more effort than did a VCR. Still, the WWW holds great potential for our learners who want to become "legitimate participants" in the target culture, allowing them to negotiate for meaning in authentic contexts rather than merely observing the FL in use (Zhao). Carl S. Blyth's Untangling the Web attempts to tear down the technological barriers separating students from the cultural and linguistic experiences offered by this newest of media. Professor Blyth's book, which purports to be a "guide to the Internet as a sophisticated tool to learn a new language and culture" (ix), undertakes three goals: 1) to introduce students to the FL resources on the web; 2) to help learners to search for FL sources and culturally authentic materials and interactive experiences ; 3) to show students how to use these resources to foster their own language 100 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + SPRING 1999 Reviews acquisition. While the text superbly achieves the first two ofthese goals, it insufficiently prepares students to optimize their learning experiences once they reach a given FL site. The text consists offive chapters and three appendices. The first two chapters, "Understanding Internet Basics" and "Learning to Surf," provide thorough introductions to the software solutions available to learners for exploring the WWW. Blyth establishes an extremely engaging structure and tone in which he dialogues with rather than lecturing at the student; the author addresses the reader directly and utilizes a Socratic, question-answer approach to outline important and new concepts. In an introduction to concepts such as hyperlinks, browsers, and the purpose ofURLs (those ubiquitous "www.mysite.com" web addresses we find in advertising and receive from information providers), the author prompts the reader to explore web sites that contain FL and cultural information valuable to both the elementary and the advanced student. Explanations ofhow to use simple technologies like "Back" and "Forward" buttons in the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as its "scroll bars" evince the author's unpretentious approach. This chapter nonetheless prompts the reader to attempt decidedly sophisticated procedures such saving to the hard disk a web page's contents (both text and graphics) and parsing complex URLs such as "http://www.kantei.go.jp/index-e.html" — providing even the experienced surfer with powerful strategies for maximizing his or her use of the web's content. The third chapter, "Searching the Foreign Language Web," introduces the major search engines (e.g., Yahoo, Lycos) and it reveals how these resources can provide access to a plethora ofsites directed at both the FL learner and the native speaker. Blyth recognizes that these search engines can yield an overwhelming amount of resources, and so he details strategies for increasing one's precision in any given inquiry. In an indirect fashion, the author also teaches the learner how to use the web as an encyclopedia ofsorts, showing the reader how to find sites on the Catalan...