When the going gets tough … the tough get googling

Cesare Zanca Università degli Studi di Siena When the going gets tough … the tough get googling Access to online learning materials and tools is undoubtedly an opportunity for language teachers and learners. As more and more courses include online items, online or blended learning, distance learning and web based activities, the ability to find, evaluate and appropriately use online tools is becoming an essential teaching skill. Nonetheless, teachers and language centres tend not to use online FL resources particularly when this implies encouraging students to access unfiltered web materials in a foreign language. This talk develops on the ideas about introducing corpus driven activities in the classroom through freely available and user friendly online resources discussed in Zanca (2011) and argues that our students’ familiarity with online tools like Google, Wikipedia, blogs or social networks and tasks coupled with an introduction to a corpus linguistics based methodology can increase the learner's overall autonomy and foster self-confidence through language learning-by-discovery processes. Unfiltered online resources are difficult to deal with. Learners have to unravel the meaning of unfamiliar words and grammar, but the main problems, it is argued, come from lexical bundles, idiomatic expressions, culture-bound 'hidden' messages, figurative language, humor, slang and so on. It is suggested that language centres should consider the possibility of introducing courses and activities where learners can be led to gradually build their confidence and autonomy in dealing with 'tough' unfiltered units of meaning, co-text and context, patterns, humor and other advanced features of language. Zanca C. 2011, «Developing translation strategies and cultural awareness using corpora and the web» Paris, Tralogy Session 3 - Training translators / La formation du traducteur [Online Publication], URL : lodel.irevues.inist.fr/tralogy/index.php