Heard Web
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54 TESOL JOURNAL VOL. 11 NO. 3
Searching the TESL-L Logs
Bill Snyder
A
number of recent Heard on the Web columns have reported threads from the TESL-L electronic discussion list and its branches on themes such as plagiarism, reading aloud, and the value of technology in education. As a member of the advisory board for TESL-L, I am pleased to see that users of the list value the discus-sions found there enough to report them in TESOLJournal. As the variety of topics shows, the discussions on
TESL-L range widely across our profession.
What many people do not realize, however, is that TESL-L offers other resources beyond the daily messages sent by members. One of these relatively unknown re-sources is the logs, a record of every message posted to the list since it was founded in 1991. These logs are available to members of the list and are searchable using keywords. Doing this, one can discover whether a topic has already been discussed and, if so, what people had to say about it. You can even see if opinions have changed over time.
To use the logs, one must first be a member of TESL-L. To join, go to http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~tesl-l/ and follow the instructions.
Once you are a member of TESL-L, you may search the logs by sending a command to
listserv@cunyvm.cuny.edu in the following form:
SEARCH (keyword) in TESL-L SINCE (date)
The keyword may be a single word (e.g., testing), multiple words joined by and or or (e.g., testing and assessment), or a phrase set in quotation marks (e.g., “oral language test-ing”). The date, specified by month and year (e.g., January 2001), narrows the range of the search to a particular time before the present. A search may be further limited to a particular time in the past using from and to with dates (e.g., from January 1999 to December 1999). Dates in this case are inclusive; the range presented would access all relevant messages posted in 1999. Search commands are not case sensitive, so words may be typed in upper or lowercase letters.
Thus, to search for all postings related to testing in the year 2000, one would send the command:
SEARCH TESTING TESL-L FROM January 2000 TO December 2000
When I sent this search command to TESL-L, I received a reply telling me that there were 66 matches for my search. The matches were listed by item number, the date and time the item was posted, and the subject line of the posting (“Recs” refers to the amount of disk space used by the message):
Item # Date Time Recs Subject ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ 039165 00/01/09 20:08 30 Retentions
To read the whole text of an individual item, you need to send a command to the TESL-L e-mail address given above, specifying the item number:
GETPOST TESL-L (item number) Example: GETPOST TESL-L 39165
Requests for more than one post can be made by listing each item number after the search command. A series of sequential posts can be requested by using a hyphen between the first and last item numbers of the sequence. You can even request a number of posts using a combina-tion of the two, as in the following:
GETPOST TESL-L 39165 39300 39532-39534
Of course, in some cases, you might not be able to tell from the subject line whether a post is relevant; therefore, below each item that is listed is a short three-line excerpt showing the context in which the keyword is used:
Sarah Rilling Editor, Heard on the Web
TESOL Journal Department of English
Kent State University P.O. Box 5190 Kent, OH 44224 USA
E-mail submissions may be sent to srilling@kent.edu For further details on submissions, see the publications submission guidelines available at http://www.tesol.org/
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VOL. 11 NO. 3 TESOL JOURNAL
Item #39165 (9 Jan 2000 20:08) - Retentions
What are your feelings and thoughts about retentions of ESLers? In this age of ever increasing testing, the classroom teachers I work with are becoming more reluctant to pass students they say they “can’t test” because …1
In my search using the keyword testing, I accessed threads on testing speaking ability, the use of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the efficacy of TOEFL training, the use of written tests to measure speaking ability, and individual posts on testing reading and vocabulary.
TESL-L is a valuable daily resource for teachers, but just as much worth can be found in its logs, for those who look.
Note
1 Excerpted text used with permission.
Author
Bill Snyder teaches in the MA TEFL program at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey, and is the current project director of TESL-L.
