_Contents

Introduction page 4

Unit 1 Computer Users 9

2. Computer Architecture 14

3. Computer Applications 21

4. Peripherals 25

5. Interview: Former Student 30

6. Operating Systems 34

7. Graphical User Interfaces 38

8. Applications Programs 42

9. Multimedia 47

10. Interview: Computing Support Officer 51

11. Networks 55

12. The Internet 59

13. The World Wide Web 63

14. Websites 67

15. Interview: Webpage Creator 72

16. Communications Systems 76

17. Computing Support 81

18. Data Security l 85

19. Data Security 2 89

20. Interview: The ex-hacker 94

21. Software Engineering 99

22. People in Computing 104

23. Recent Developments in IT 109

24. The Future of IT 114

25. Interview: Electronic Publishing 118

Listening Script 123

Key to Progress Tests 130

Photocopiable Progress Tests 134

Introduction

READERSHIP

Oxford English for Information Technology is for people studying Information Technology and Computing, or working in the IT sector. It is suitable for use in universities, technical schools and adult education programmes in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and Latin America. Students will have an intermediate to advanced level of English (having studied English for four years or more) and will want to develop language skills in the context of their specialism.

OBJECTIVES

Oxford English for Information Technology aims at all-round skills development.

Reading: to develop the skill of reading for information from a wide variety of authentic IT texts. These include longer specialist reading texts to provide challenging reading for students already proficient in computing in their own language.

Listening: to develop the ability to understand native speakers with a variety of accents talking about IT. Listening for specific information, and the skill of listening for the main points in a description, explanation and argument are developed.

Speaking: to develop the ability to participate in exchanges of information and opinions in the context of IT, to provide explanations of features of computing and to give advice on IT problems; to develop strategies for coping with not understanding and not being understood.

Writing: to write instructions, descriptions and explanations about topics in computing and IT.

Language: to consolidate and extend the student's understanding and use of structures and functions common to Information Technology and computing at intermediate to

advanced levels. The language content has several strands:

• covers key points of grammar and key functions appropriate to this level

• includes language items important for decoding texts in the specialism

• teaches and practises language skills for reading, listening, speaking and writing.

DESIGN

Oxford English for Information Technology is designed to meet the needs of both teachers and students. The authors recognise that few English teachers have a specialist knowledge of IT although many will use computers in their work and at home. The materials used in this book for presenting language items are selected so that they can be understood by an interested non-specialist but at the same time are not patronising for students of the specialism.

The authors also recognise that IT students need exposure to the full range of IT texts in English. Hence the materials used for practice and production have more specialist content. Problem-solving tasks encourage students to combine their growing knowledge of English with their IT knowledge. The reading passages for homework or self-study in class contain the most specialist content. Some of this content will be unfamiliar to your students, placing them in a real study situation where they have to cope with both English and new information.

The text is graded in two ways. In terms of language, the book progresses from revision items such as questions forms in the Past simple to more complex structures such as cleft-sentences. In terms of IT, the book matches the normal teaching sequence of the subject.

ORGANISATION

The Student's Book contains 25 units, each providing around 4 hours of work. Each unit contains work on a mix of skills but Units 5,10, 15,20 and 25 focus especially on developing listening skills. Each of these units contains an authentic interview, discussion or an extract from an IT professional at work.

Units are composed of these sections:

Starter: short 'to make you think' warm-up tasks to get students thinking about the topic, to share their knowledge of language and the specialism, and to start working together cooperatively.

Listening: brief listening tasks often based round an authentic diagram or other visual.

Reading: authentic short texts to develop appropriate reading skills and to introduce new content; taken from textbooks, newspapers, popular computing magazines, Internet newsgroups, screen displays, web pages, manuals and adverts.

Language work: explanation of key language items at this level and two practice activities; the first is more controlled, the second is less controlled to encourage more natural use of the newly learned language.

Problem-solving task: to create a need to use language to communicate with other students and as a comprehension check. The solution requires use of language, logic and content from previous units.

Writing: exercises that provide practice in writing instructions, descriptions and explanations.

Speaking: in addition to the speaking opportunities provided by other sections, especially Starter and Problem-solving, there are regular information and opinion exchange tasks for pairs and small group practice and presentation tasks for individual work.

Specialist reading: longer authentic texts dealing with an aspect of the unit topic. These are challenging texts intended to stretch the students. They can be used for self-study or homework.

Authentic interviews: as described above, every fifth unit is built around an authentic interview with IT and computer students and specialists. Each interview unit has a Word Study section on new vocabulary studied up to that point in the textbook.

End matter in Student's Book: Tapescript and Glossary of technical terms and abbreviations. Definitions and pronunciation of approximately 850 terms in computing and IT are provided.

Spelling

The texts used in this book come from a variety of sources and include US texts. For this reason, some American spellings such as realize will be found.

Where possible we have standardised the spelling of terms such as email, rather than e-mail, taking as our model what seems to be the most common form in current IT literature.

USING THE BOOK

APPROACH

Oxford English for Information Technology takes a broadly communicative approach with the addition of techniques such as problem-solving, a particularly appropriate technique for students of a subject which is very much concerned with finding solutions to problems. Activities focusing on form are also given an important role.

Most of the activities are designed for pair or group work but there are also individual tasks for class-time and for homework. When the class are involved in pair or group activities, use the time to monitor their performance. Try not to interrupt too much.

Make a note of any serious inaccuracies and deal with them at the end of the activity.

Some teachers of English for Specific Purposes worry about their own lack of knowledge of the specialism, that they are not experts in the field. They should not be so concerned. What ESP teachers should aim to be is experts at language teaching. All ESP teachers, however, should have an interest at a lay level in the specialism. It's worth reading an introduction to the subject and developing links with teachers of the specialism who can explain technical aspects to you and may provide help in locating authentic materials for your teaching. It's not difficult these days to keep up with developments in computing. Many national newspapers carry regular articles about computing and some have special supplements on a weekly basis. There are TV programmes from time to time. And of course your students can often help you.

STARTERS

These are best set as pair or group activities ending with a teacher-led round-up so that both language and ideas can be shared. Note down the best ideas on the board or use an overhead projector so that the written form reinforces the spoken.

LISTENING

Most of these comments about listening are equally valid for reading.

Most units contain a pre-listening task. Typically, these tasks consist of a small number of questions often based on a diagram. Ideally, the students are able to answer a third of the questions from the data presented. They can make reasonable guesses about a further third based on inferences from the data and from their own knowledge of the subject matter. They are unable to make accurate guesses about the remaining third. The reasons for this structure are that the easy questions provide

encouragement, the remaining questions provide a reason for listening to the recording which follows - to check whether their guesses are correct and to find the answers to the questions they could not answer. Because pre-listening tasks encourage the students to start thinking about and predicting the content of the text, this makes it easier to make connections between known information and new information from the text. Often students are asked to pool their answers so that what they know about the subject can be shared; hence predictions about the content can be made more accurately.

Pre-listening tasks also serve to introduce important terms which the students will meet in the recording. However, the recording will also contain a number of words which are not familiar to your students. This guide advises you to pre-teach a small number of these words which are important for an understanding of the text Where a word can be inferred from context, you are advised not to pre-teach it as students should develop this strategy for dealing with unfamiliar words. In most cases, the unfamiliar word can be ignored. Recognising and ignoring irrelevant information is an important survival strategy in listening.

With the interviews in particular, it is important that you set the scene for your students before they listen. They should know how many speakers there are and what the context is. They should be encouraged to predict topics that will occur in the recording.

Setting the scene, sharing information about the content and the language likely to be used in the recording, predicting the answers to the questions, pre-teaching the few essential words, are all ways of helping your students before they listen. But you can also help them as they listen. The simplest way is to pause the recording at suitable points. Suggestions are made in this Guide of suitable

places to pause but you can add additional processing or thinking time for students by increasing the number and length of the pauses. You can also play the recording more than once. When the tasks are complete, it's important that students have an opportunity to hear the recording all the way through without interruption*

Although the answer key gives as full answers as possible, it is not always necessary to insist on such complete answers from your students, nor is it necessary for them to write complete sentences. The focus in these tasks is on understanding, not on production.

READING

Most units contain a pre-reading task which has the same function as the pre-listening tasks described above.

Many of the tasks focus on developing the skill of scanning a text quickly for specific detail. To do this well, students must learn to ignore information which is not relevant to their task and scan the text for clues which relate to the information they seek. Applying a little time pressure can help. If students are not given quite sufficient time to read word by word, they will develop more efficient ways of reading. Reading for main points is a more difficult skill to develop. Students must learn to ignore examples and fine detail. Defending their answers in groups or in whole class round-ups can help students identify what is important in a text.

Many of the reading tasks involve other skills. For example, reading and note-taking, reading and reporting. A common task of this kind combining reading, note-taking and speaking is a jigsaw read-and-report activity. In these tasks, students are asked to work in groups of three and to read one text each, noting its main points. Then they are asked to exchange information with other students in their group to complete a table or note-taking

frame covering all three texts. At the report . stage, students may attempt to report in the mother tongue or simply exchange notes with the other students in their group. Encourage them to do the reporting stage orally and in English so that all three skills are equally practised.

An alternative to jigsaw read-and-report for more advanced students is to treat these tasks as a 'triad' activity. This is described in detail in the notes for Unit 23 but you can also use this technique with texts of your own.

Most of the texts in group reading tasks are roughly equal in difficulty level. Where a text is easier or more difficult than the others, this is mentioned in the guide to the unit. You can direct these texts to the less and more able students in the group.

Reading aloud is rarely of value in the classroom but you may find the tapescripts of some of the easier listening texts which involve more than one speaker could be used for role plays or scripted interviews. The difference between them and the reading texts is that they are examples of authentic or semi-authentic spoken English.

LANGUAGE WORK

Ways of presenting each language item are included in the guide to the units. Most of these rely on a simple board presentation using key examples from the reading or listening texts. As far as possible, examples in the context of computing are used. You may have your own favourite way of presenting some of these items which you can substitute. Typically, the presentation is followed by two practice tasks. The first task is usually more controlled and the second a freer and therefore more demanding activity. Depending on the level of your class, you may decide to do these tasks orally in class before the students write or simply set them as individual writing tasks.

PROBLEM-SOLVING

These tasks provide students with the opportunity to use and acquire language in a much less controlled way. The problems have been chosen to interest the students and to allow them to use their knowledge of computing. The reading and listening texts in each unit and earlier units should provide most of the English terms they need and the language work sections should provide the means of expression. You may wish to revise language you anticipate will be useful. In striving to communicate their solution to the problem to their partner or the other students in the group, students will make this language their own. Do not interfere too much unless communication has broken down completely. It is in making an effort to understand and be understood that language is best acquired.

WRITING

As the book progresses, the writing tasks move from very controlled to less controlled. Where you think your students need more help, do the task orally in class and set the writing as homework. There are many approaches to correcting written work. If you wish to experiment with peer correction where students mark each other's work, our recommendation is that you ask students simply to mark lightly with a pencil dot any item in their partner's work which they do not understand or think may be incorrect. Then return the work to their partner. If he or she does not agree that there is a problem, you can then intervene.

SPEAKING

The speaking tasks are straightforward exchange activities. In the early units, they are mainly information exchange but in the later units there are examples of opinion exchange tasks. Like the problem-solving tasks, these activities provide opportunities for students to

develop strategies for coping with not understanding and not being understood. Encourage your students to rephrase when they are not understood and to think of ways round the problem of not remembering a key word.

WORD STUDY

Train your students in good practice as regards vocabulary right from the beginning of the course. Get them to keep their own vocabulary notebooks in which they record not only the meaning of key terms in computing but examples of their usage. Encourage students to spend a few minutes every day learning new words. Regular vocabulary tests are a stimulus for students to make the effort to do this. You can use these tasks in the textbook as vocabulary tests. They are spaced at five-unit intervals and summarise the key terms presented in preceding units.

Present ways in which students can record and store their growing computing vocabulary. Encourage them to keep related words in the same part of their notebook. For example, names of storage devices. They can also list words with their common collocations. For example, hard/floppy + disk, disk + drive. Simple crosswords and word games like 'hang the man' are useful short activities to revise key vocabulary at the start of a lesson.

PROGRESS TESTS

Progress tests are included in this guide after every five units. The time you allow for these tests depends on the level of your class - 30 minutes is suggested for an advanced class.