A Brief History of the Student List Project

The Student List Project, originally called the "International EFL/ESL Email Discussion Lists" or just the "SL Lists" was established in February of 1994 by three individuals: Lloyd Holliday (LaTrobe University, Melbourne), Mark Warschauer (U. Cal, Irvine, then at Charles University, Prague) and Thomas Robb, (Kyoto Sangyo University). While Mark has resigned, Tom &Lloyd are still actively involved, with Tom as Manager.

The lists were originally implemented on "Majordomo" software, but needed features such as the ability to keep interlopers off the lists, convinced Lloyd to get his university to install a real "Listserv" at La Trobe circa 1996. The lists have been run from LaTrobe's Listserv ever since.

Early on, the project was joined by others, including Lonnie Turbee (now Lonnie Chu), Leslie Opp-Beckman, David Tillyer and David Ross. Marilyn Martin and Rachel Koch, in charge of Engl-SL for the first few years, did a marvelous job of handing students questions and posing their own via their weekly "puzzlers". (See "ENGL-SL: Access to In-Depth Help with English," Marilyn Martin &Rachel Koch in Virtual Connections: Online Activities & Projects for Networking Language Learners, 1995, University of Hawaii Press.) In recent years, Michael Glass, formerly of Sogang University, Seoul, has been the person most involved with the day-to-day monitoring of the e-mail lists.

The e-mail lists in their "hey day" had close to 1000 active participants, but with the increasing availability of web-based technologies, the number of users dwindled to less than 200 users in 2003.

It is expected that the new "web-based" environment (http://sl-lists.net) will prove to be an effective way for students to practice communicating with others in a sheltered, nourishing environment.