CUNY is participating in a collaborative venture that has resulted in a new "subject-specific" gopher. Implemented and maintained by CUNY on CUNYVM, the gopher - an Internet tool giving reading access to a variety of online databases - is specifically tailored to teachers and teacher trainers in English as a Second or Foreign Language working at locations worldwide.

Through gopher, they will be able to obtain, at no cost, a wide range of pedagogical documents. Many of these are produced by the English Language Programs Division of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which is providing partial support for the TES/FL gopher with a recent grant to CUNY. Among the many documents on TES/FL gopher are issues of the journal English Teaching Forum, lists of Binational Centers, and announcements of international conferences, fellowships, and employment opportunities.

A specific reason for USIA's support for CUNY as the TES/FL gopher site is the University's prior creation of TESL-L, the listserv list, or electronic mail discussion group, for teachers of English as a second language. The TESL-L listserv membership includes more than four thousand teachers in 73 countries, making it one of the largest interactive listserve forums on the Internet. TESL-L will continue to be maintained and many of its resources will be available to the TES/FL gopher. Additional resources will be linked to the CUNY TES/FL gopher upon recommendation of teachers and specialists in the field.

Gopher is a versatile and increasingly popular communication and research tool. Selecting from menus, the user can traverse the network in multi-layered searches by topic for information available on different systems. Gopher requires no technical skills or special knowledge on the part of its users. Its format functions on the model of a library catalogue, permitting both general browsing and cross-referenced queries. You can find TES/FL on the main menu of CUNYVM's gopher.