Abstract
The incorporation of emergent electronic discourse genres into pedagogic practices in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) has made it possible for students to use the target language in real contexts of communication through writing. The Personal Home Page (PHP) seems to be especially suitable to pedagogical applications as it provides the student with a locus for using basic linguistic functions in English in the construction of her/his PHP on the Internet. In this paper, we firstly present an analysis of recurrent features in exemplars of the cybergenre PHP in terms of content, structural organization and functions of language. Next, we propose an activity for EFL teaching that aims at engaging the student in the virtual world through the construction of her/his own PHP. A series of experimentations with WebEnglish - a computer assisted English course developed at Laboratorio de Pesquisa e Ensino de Leitura e Redacao at the National University at Santa Maria, Brazil – has demonstrated the potentiality of this kind of activity to motivate students and thus facilitate the development of sociolinguistic competencies in the target language. Key words: computer assisted language learning, EFL teaching, electronic discourse genre, personal home page.
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