Once upon a time there were many learners in the world who could not get hold of 'real' English texts, spoken or written. Now, in our wonderful IT age, any learner with Internet access is flooded with authentic English. In time, no doubt, a new ELT methodology will emerge, guiding us through this topic. I'm sure the Ph D theses are already being written. But until we have a definitive new set of pedagogical tools for dealing with websites, let's see what we can do with some of our old ones.
Websites are texts, after all.
For the purposes of this article, I've just re-read the useful list of RC skills given in Annex II of the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination. It is interesting to see how many are relevant to website comprehension. First, we should train students to ask some basic questions about any website. In the old world of printed texts, we rarely read a text without having any idea where it has come from. But when we are on the Internet, that is exactly what often happens.