A SYSTEM FOR THE EVALUATION OF ESL WEB SITES

A Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

with a

Major in Teaching English as a Second Language

in the

College of Graduate Studies

University of Idaho

 

 

 

by

Jeffrey T. Nelson

 

 

September 1997

 

 

Major Professor: Steve Chandler, Ph.D.


AUTHORIZATION TO SUBMIT

THESIS

This thesis of Jeffrey T. Nelson, submitted for the degree of Master of Arts with a major in Teaching English as a Second Language and titled "A System for the Evaluation of ESL Web Sites," has been reviewed in final form, as indicated by the signatures and dates given below. Permission is now granted to submit final copies to the College of Graduate Studies for approval.

Major Professor  Steve Chandler  Date         
Committee Members  Gordon Thomas  Date         
   Alfred J. Jensen  Date         
Department Administrator  Douglas Q. Adams  Date         
Discipline's College Dean  Kurt Olsson  Date         

 

Final Approval and Acceptance by the College of Graduate Studies

 

 Jean'ne M. ShreeveDate         

ABSTRACT

 

This paper presents and explains a system for the evaluation of sites on the World-Wide Web intended for the use of students of English as a second or foreign language. This system is used in a Web site with an interactive form allowing members of a team to submit reviews of Web sites and for the public to access those reviews. The review system is based on a widely accepted pedagogical model for language learning, the Proficiency Approach; general Web design principles; and other evaluative systems, particularly those for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The purpose of the system and the Web site is to promote sound use of the World-Wide Web for language teaching and learning, in light of past failures of language-learning technology to meet expectations.

 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

Many individuals have assisted me, without whose help I would never have been able to do this project. First, it was through discussions with Dr. Steve Chandler and information in his courses that my initial idea was focused. His help was invaluable with respect to the direction of this project. Dr. Gordon Thomas and Dr. Charles Stratton both helped me learn how to author Web pages, and Dr. Joy Egbert (now of Indiana) provided inspiration for my original project idea and gave me a great deal of instruction in CALL. Mr. Colin Sachs, with whom I share an office and the task of managing computer labs and a Web server, has allowed me to bounce ideas off him and has given a great deal of useful feedback. I thank my friend and former Spanish professor, Dr. Fred Jensen, who has inspired me by his example of teaching language in a fun and engaging way. Thanks to Drs. Chandler, Thomas, and Jensen, and Mr. Sachs, who served on my thesis committee. I thank my friends, Nick and Tammy Sewell, for their encouragement and enchiladas, and, finally, my parents for their constant moral support throughout this project.

 


LIST OF TABLES

 

Table 1. Values for Pedagogical Criteria 36

Table 2. Values for Design/Construction Criteria 37

 

 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 

Figure 1. 17 grammar quizzes 39

Figure 2. Sample grammar quiz form (answered correctly) 40

Figure 3. Sample grammar quiz form (answered incorrectly) 40

Figure 4. Sample grammar quiz (correct answers revealed) 41

Figure 5. Description: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center 42

Figure 6. Purpose: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center 42

Figure 7. Pedagogy: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center 43

Figure 8. Design/Construction: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center 44

Figure 9. Help Center Question Form 44

Figure 10. Sample question list 45

Figure 11. Response to student question 45

Figure 12. Description: Dave's ESL Café Help Center 46

Figure 13. Purpose: Dave's ESL Café Help Center 47

Figure 14. Pedagogy: Dave's ESL Café Help Center 47

Figure 15. Design/Construction: Dave's ESL Café Help Center 48

Figure 16. Instructions and beginner-level lesson menu 49

Figure 17. Lesson 49

Figure 18. Rule 50

Figure 19. Activity 1 50

Figure 20. Vague, uninteractive activity 51

Figure 21. Description: Planet English Interactive Lessons 52

Figure 22. Purpose: Planet English Interactive Lessons 52

Figure 23. Pedagogy: Planet English Interactive Lessons 53

Figure 24. Design/Construction: Planet English Interactive Lessons 53

Figure 25. CELOP Virtual Vacation Planner 55

Figure 26. Description: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner 55

Figure 27. Purpose: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner 55

Figure 28. Pedagogy: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner 56

Figure 29. Design/Construction: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner 56

Figure 30. Sound buttons 57

Figure 31. Description: Weather in the USA 57

Figure 32. Purpose: Weather in the USA 58

Figure 33. Pedagogy: Weather in the USA 58

Figure 34. Design/Construction: Weather in the USA 59

 


TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

TITLE PAGE i

AUTHORIZATION TO SUBMIT ii

ABSTRACT iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv

DEDICATION v

TABLE OF CONTENTS vi

LIST OF TABLES viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

INTRODUCTION 1

LITERATURE REVIEW 6

Pedagogical Theory 6

Evaluating Educational Software 11

Evaluating Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) materials 12

Evaluating Internet Activities for ESL 13

Evaluating Web Site Design 14

Identifying the Purpose of a Web Site 21

EVALUATION SYSTEM FOR ESL WEB SITES 26

Purpose 26

Pedagogy 28

Design/Construction 30

Description/Open-Ended 35

The Overall Ratings 36

REVIEWS 39

 

THE WEB SITE ESL INTERACTIVE 60

Purpose 60

Structure of the Site 60

Technical Information 61

Future Expansions 61

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSIONS 62

Improving ESL Web Sites 62

Limitations of the Review System 65

Benefits of this Review System 67

APPENDIX A 69

APPENDIX B 70

APPENDIX C 71

REFERENCES 78

 


DEDICATION

 

 

 

This work is dedicated to the teachers and staff of the Intensive American Language Center at Washington State University, who strive for excellence in pedagogy.


CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

 

Computers can be tremendously useful tools for English language instruction. They can process user input quickly, and integrate voice, music, video, pictures, and text into lessons. They can be programmed to tailor instruction and tests for each individual learner. They can even be used to make students more comfortable and willing to take risks, because of their "untiring, unjudgmental nature" (Butler-Pascoe 1997, p. 20). Therefore, many people argue that computers should be used for language instruction.

However, while there are many potential benefits, the issue is becoming not whether but how computers should be used for language instruction. Regardless of the potential benefits or disadvantages of using computers for language instruction, for a variety of reasons they are already being used for English language instruction, and will continue to be used.

According to Snyder (1994), computers are here to stay in education because there is a tremendous amount of money behind their introduction, especially in government-funded schools. (While this may not be true in many private language institutes, it certainly is true in many university language programs and high-school and primary school ESL programs.)

Another reason why computers are being used for language instruction is that many language institutes find themselves in a dual role: not only teaching English, but also giving academic preparation for students from foreign countries who wish to study in American universities. Computers are ubiquitous in American universities; their use is not just recommended but actually required for many courses: for writing, doing research, and many other tasks. In fact, some universities even require students to buy their own personal computers. Furthermore, computers have become an essential tool in the work force; the world of business has been revolutionized since the introduction of computers. In contrast, many foreign students come to the U.S.A. with limited or no computer skills, because computers are not as much a part of everyday life in their countries. Therefore, as a part of their mission for academic preparation, many intensive English programs; for instance, the Intensive American Language Center at Washington State University, try to familiarize their students with computers, by having special computer classes and by using computers as a teaching tool in their regular language classes.

Computer-Assisted Language Learning, or CALL, has existed since the 1960's, and there is a body of work related to evaluating CALL software programs and the effectiveness of CALL in general. The World-Wide Web, Web for short, is a relatively new innovation in computing. There are many applications of the Web for teaching languages, and many Web sites already exist for that purpose. However, there is little published work so far about evaluating Web sites for language teaching.

When new technologies, such as the World Wide Web, are introduced, their proponents often make grandiose claims. In the 1920's, Thomas Edison said that the motion picture would "revolutionize our educational system and . . . in a few years supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks" (Oppenheimer 1997). Similar claims have been made for the use of radio, television, and video. However, the great expectations for those new technologies rarely become reality. In the 1950's, when audio labs were first introduced, they were seen as a great revolution in language teaching but actually often worked poorly and bored the students (Hoffman 1995/1996). Similarly, while radio, television, and video are all used to a certain extent in language classrooms, it cannot be said that any of them has revolutionized language teaching or any other form of education, for that matter.

Computers are now often being seen as a panacea for educational ills, including (but not limited to) inadequate funding, insufficient teaching staff, uninteresting instruction, and so on. Some think that computers will eventually replace teachers (Hoffman 1995/1996). Bennett (1997) believes that computers have the potential to eliminate illiteracy. However, it is unlikely that computers will ever meet the most extravagant of expectations. For instance, Frizler (1995) recognizes that it is a myth that computers will ever replace teachers. Snyder (1994) also believes that computers cannot and should not replace teachers, but should be used by teachers as a useful tool to enhance instruction. Computers will probably not solve problems with funding or inadequate staff, either; in fact, using computers usually requires an even greater expenditure of time and money than traditional instructional methods (Layne & Lepeintre 1996).

Another problem with great expectations is that when for whatever reason those expectations are not met, the public first blames a lack of funding, then poor teacher implementation, and finally the technology itself (Oppenheimer 1997). Presently, the popular press is already reporting a backlash against computers in the classroom. Computers are said to be actually worse than useless; for instance, they may cause diminished capacity for creative thought, and take precious funding away from other, more worthy educational programs (Oppenheimer 1997).

There are many reasons for this growing public perception of computers as poor classroom devices. One is that computers are not being utilized by teachers to their potential. According to Murison-Bowie (1993), teachers don't seem to be taking advantage of technology's possible benefits. He claimed that several parties were responsible for this problem--teachers, for not being inquisitive enough; materials developers, for not understanding how new technologies could be used to meet the profession's needs; and hardware developers, for creating restrictive systems which dictate the teaching method.

CALL has not always been designed and used with the best or most current pedagogical foundation. Nancy Hunt (1993) discussed the problem of educators having a "narrow view" of the use of computer technology--mainly for independent drills and word-processing, when in fact newer technologies could be used to help the student actively participate in language learning. Conrad (1996) noted that CALL software remained through the 1980's rooted in outdated pedagogical approaches such as audiolingualism and behaviorism. Not until recently has CALL begun to conform to newer pedagogical approaches.

Finally, a common problem is for the excitement surrounding a new technology to cause teachers to forget to use good pedagogy (Layne & Lepeintre 1996). For instance, the allure of the Internet or Web causes many teachers to fall into the trap of thinking that just getting their students online creates language teaching (Frizler 1995).

Therefore, there is a need for considering carefully the use of computer technology if it is to be well-received and useful rather than a source of public disappointment and disillusionment. The technology should be used, as much as possible, to the maximum extent of its capabilities to enhance learning, and pedagogical research and practices should drive what is done with the technology, not the other way around.

One way of promoting effective and appropriate use of technology for education is the creation and distribution of evaluation systems for computer equipment, software, and activities. Systems for the evaluation of educational software have been produced (e.g., Hunt 1993), as well as at least one system for the evaluation of English as a Second Language (ESL) Internet activities (Goldstein & Gray 1996). However, no systems specifically for the evaluation of Web language-learning materials have been produced. Therefore, systems for evaluating Web-based materials need to be further developed and made available to a large number of educators so that they can make informed choices about what Web sites to use for their classes and how to maximize the pedagogical effectiveness of teacher-developed Web materials.

 


CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

 

Systems of evaluation exist for foreign-language and ESL pedagogy, for CALL software, for general-purpose sites on the Web, and for general Internet activities for ESL. However, so far, no system has been presented (publicly, at least) for the evaluation of ESL Web sites. Furthermore, no Web-based database for ESL site evaluations exists.

Therefore, this review will encompass sources from several different areas: pedagogical theory, existing evaluation systems for CALL and Internet/Web materials for language learning, general guidelines for good Web design, and taxonomical categorization of ESL/language learning Web sites, with the purpose of condensing and generalizing the points covered to create an evaluation system for ESL Web sites which is concise, simple, and easy to use, yet thorough.

 

Pedagogical Theory

Pedagogical concerns and theory should drive the way technology is used in education, not the other way around. Therefore, in considering how to evaluate the use of sites on the World-Wide Web (Web, for short) for teaching English, it would be useful to describe widely-accepted, current pedagogical theory, and then analyze how that theory should shape the construction of Web-based materials.

Theories about the nature of language and about learning and teaching are used to derive theories about the way language should be taught (Richards & Rodgers 1986). A theory of how language should be taught is called an approach. The approach which a teacher adopts determines the methods and techniques used in the classroom. According to Anthony (1963), "techniques must be consistent with a method, and therefore in harmony with an approach as well" (p. 67).

One point of contention in language learning theory has always been rationalism versus empiricism. The empiricist perspective is that the way a person learns language depends on his or her environment. This position has been maintained in this century by behaviorists, notably the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Rationalists, on the other hand, believe that humans are genetically pre-programmed from birth to learn language in certain ways, independently of environmental factors. In the 1960's, rationalism became the generally accepted view (Omaggio-Hadley 1993). Noam Chomsky (1959) wrote a pivotal critical review of Skinner's theory of language learning. It has been known that children have an ability to learn language well which adults generally do not. Skinner had explained this by saying that children are simply good at imitating the utterances of adults. Chomsky objected to Skinner's explanation because adults' examples of language were not always perfect, and children make errors that they would never had heard from adultsñfor instance, overgeneralizations such as goed for the past tense of go. According to Chomsky, these discrepancies could only be explained by the presence of an innate ability in children to understand the structure of language. Chomsky theorized that this innate ability indicated the existence of a universal grammar. Children merely need to determine the options which their particular language takes within the universal grammar in order to learn it (Omaggio-Hadley 1993).

Continuing the rationalist tradition, the Natural Approach, the most influential theoretical approach in the 1980's, is based on the theoretical principles about language learning promoted by Chomsky. The originators of this approach, Tracy Terrell and the linguist Stephen Krashen, believe that the best way for adults to learn a foreign language is the same way that children learn their first language (Richards & Rodgers 1986).

Krashen reduced his theory of second language acquisition to five hypotheses about the nature of language development which govern the Natural Approach. First, the Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis says that people can develop language use either by "acquisition," which is the natural, unconscious way in which children develop language, or by "learning," through conscious, formal instruction in the rules of the language. According to Krashen and Terrell, learning does not assist acquisition; they are separate, unrelated processes. Second, the Monitor Hypothesis says that the rules the learner develops through the learning process serve for self-correction of errors. Next, the Natural Order Hypothesis states that people acquire grammatical structures of a new language in a predictable, natural sequence, no matter what their native language, and errors are natural and expected parts of this process. Research in second-language acquisition suggests that formal instruction does not change the natural sequence of language acquisition (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991). Fourth, the Input Hypothesis claims that learners acquire language best which is slightly beyond their current level in the natural sequence. Last, according to the Affective Filter Hypothesis, people acquire language better when they are motivated and have a good self-image and low anxiety (Krashen & Terrell 1983).

The Natural Approach borrows and adapts techniques from many different methods, since the primary pedagogical focus of the approach is to provide large amounts of comprehensible input slightly above the learner's current level and to reduce students' affective filters. For instance, it borrows command-and-response activities from the Total Physical Response method; mime, gesture, and context-based activities from the Direct Method; and group-based work from Community Language Learning (Richards & Rodgers 1986).

Although the Natural Approach has attracted much more interest than other innovative approaches offered during the same period, it does have some shortcomings (Richards & Rodgers 1986). One major flaw, which Krashen and Terrell recognized, is that during group work, which is a favored technique because through "group camaraderie" (Richards & Rodgers 1986, p. 137) the affective filter is supposed to be lowered, not all the comprehensible input from other students is grammatically correct. Krashen and Terrell give no suggestions for alleviating this problem. In fact, the Natural Approach avoids error correction and formal grammar instruction because such practices supposedly increase student anxiety (Omaggio-Hadley 1993).

The disadvantage to not correcting grammar mistakes is that it can lead to fossilization. This is when a student reaches a particular level at which he or she can competently communicate, but finds it impossible or difficult to ever achieve a more advanced ability, or at least to correct certain systematic errors. According to Higgs & Clifford (1982) early correction of errors is vital in order to avoid fossilization. In fact, the time needed to fossilize may be four semesters of instruction or less. Higgs & Clifford's hypotheses about fossilization contradict Krashen's ideas that "errors will eventually correct themselves" and that error correction should be avoided (Omaggio 1984, p. 50).

Therefore, there has been a resurgence of the importance of grammaticality in language teaching. For instance, since 1984, ACTFL guidelines for proficiency have included statements about accuracy (Omaggio 1984, p. 45). Although teaching language communicatively is now the dominant teaching approach (Goldstein & Gray 1996), the ability to communicate is no longer regarded as overriding the need to correct mistakes, as it was in the 1970's (Omaggio 1984). Instead, proficiency is regarded as the desired outcome for language learners. In a scheme by Canale and Swain (1980), aspects of proficiency are defined as grammatical correctness in addition to various elements of communicative ability.

Omaggio (1984) used the concept of proficiency to outline a new approach to language teaching, the Proficiency Approach. This is a communicative approach that shares the major characteristics of the Natural Approach, such as teaching language skills in the sequence in which students naturally learn them, but adds to that by implementing some error correction to avoid student fossilization. It also involves maximizing student learning by teaching language in context with genuine purposes which will be encountered in the target culture (Omaggio 1984).

Omaggio (known as Omaggio-Hadley in her later works) has created a criteria-based system based on five hypotheses which are the guidelines for teaching language communicatively using the Proficiency Approach. Here is a summary of the hypotheses. (The full text of her hypotheses may be found in Appendix A.)

Hypothesis 1. A range of real-life contexts is taught.

Corollary 1. Students should express their own meanings as soon as possible.

Corollary 2. Active communication among students is promoted.

Corollary 3. Creative language practice is encouraged.

Corollary 4. Authentic language is used.

Hypothesis 2. Students practice many real-life tasks.

Hypothesis 3. Error correction occurs.

Hypothesis 4. Affective needs are met; students are motivated and not threatened.

Hypothesis 5. Cultural understanding is promoted (Omaggio-Hadley 1993).

One element of context in language learning is the sensory input which the student receives in conjunction with new language. The more rich and varied the sensory input, the better the student will understand the input and the better he or she will remember the language which was presented. According to Stevick (1982), the mind stores different but simultaneously experienced types of sensory input together. For instance, a student will probably remember a vocabulary word in conjunction with pictures, sounds, emotions, and smells which were associated with the event of learning that word. Furthermore, the vividness and intensity of an experience also determines how long it will be remembered. Therefore, the presentation of comprehensible input can be assisted by the use of different media in conjunction with the language, such as pictures and sound. According to Omaggio-Hadley (1993), pictures as an aid to developing context can improve students' comprehension, especially at lower levels. Krashen and Terrell (1983) wrote, comparing radio to television, that images help with comprehension. Therefore, simultaneous use of multiple forms of sensory input is beneficial for student comprehension and retention of language.

Evaluating Educational Software

Although a large amount of literature exists about the evaluation of educational software, Squires and McDougall (1994) have compiled a single comprehensive source of information about criteria-based evaluation of educational software. Their book covers sources of educational software, a description and critique of the checklist approach to evaluation, and several frameworks for studying software.

One sample checklist which Squires and McDougall include is the Microsift Evaluators Guide, from 1982. This thorough checklist includes a courseware description section, with questions about the hardware requirements, type of instructional techniques used, such as game, simulation, tutorial, or drill, documentation, and instructional objectives and prerequisites. In the evaluation section of the Microsift Guide, categories of evaluation include content, instructional quality, and technical quality, in addition to open-ended questions about the strengths, weaknesses, and potential classroom uses of the software. A complete list of the evaluative criteria may be found in Appendix B.

Evaluating Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) materials

Hunt (1993) visited the software section at the 1993 TESOL convention and noted what seemed to be good characteristics of software, from a communicative pedagogical perspective. She then listed criteria for good CALL materials, which are paraphrased below:

1. Flexibility across ages and levels.

2. Thematic, contextual presentation.

3. Relevant, interesting content.

4. "Multiple modalities"--listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

5. Open-ended student expression.

6. Natural interaction among students.

7. Mixed media (not "multimedia")--books and tapes complement the software.

8. Detailed documentation, including lesson plans, setup, etc., is provided.

9. In-service training is offered (pp. 8-9).

Hunt believed that CALL developers who follow these guidelines can overcome the tendency to write software based on older, outdated pedagogical approaches and instead create materials which encourage students to engage in critical thinking, active learning and language exploration.

Hunt also mentioned that the hardware and software are not the only elements which count when using CALL; at least as important are the teachers, students, and underlying instructional principles--the "liveware" and "underware" (p. 9).

Evaluating Internet Activities for ESL

The Internet is a global communications infrastructure consisting of interconnected computers in small, local networks and larger networks of multiple interconnected local networks. The Internet originated in the 1960's and in the 1970's was developed into a general-purpose networking infrastructure upon which new applications could be conceived (Leiner et al.). Some of the applications which have been widely used on the Internet include electronic mail; Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for simultaneous communications; File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for transferring programs and files among networked computers; Gopher, for hierarchical retrieval of information; and the World Wide Web.

In a 1996 article, Goldstein and Gray, recognizing that many of their colleagues wanted to use the Internet for English teaching but not always for logical reasons, presented a criteria-based system for evaluating Internet-based ESL activities. This system is derived from communicative language learning theory and from technical aspects of the Internet.

Their five criteria are summarized below as questions:

1. Does it promote communicative language learning?

A. Does it stimulate students' interest in the learning task?

B. Does it focus on authentic contexts, not just on learning grammar and/or rote repetition?

C. Is there some learner control?

D. Does it encourage them to produce English in a variety of "genres"?

2. Is there feedback about the effectiveness of the communication?

3. Does it require few computer skills?

4. Does it use multimedia?

5. Is the technical quality good?

A. Is the transfer time short?

B. Do the visuals obscure the text? Do they enhance comprehension?

C. Is the audio understandable?

Goldstein and Gray's evaluative system encompasses all types of Internet activities, including the World-Wide Web, but it is not specifically designed for the Web. The large technical differences between the Web and other forms of the Internet (for example, the relatively easy interface and the presence of multimedia and hypermedia) mean that a system designed specifically for the Web would produce more relevant evaluations of Web pages and activities.

Evaluating Web Site Design

The Web is an application of the Internet which was invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The difference between the Web and other, older Internet applications is that the Web can deliver text and graphics simultaneously to the user's screen. In addition, most browsers (software programs designed to access and navigate the Web) provide a simple, graphical user interface and are capable of playing sounds and videos transferred over the Internet. Pages on the Web are composed and arranged using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a system of codes for marking up text which Web browsers recognize. The Web is composed of pages (separate Web documents) joined by links which are used to quickly move between pages. A group of related pages, maintained together on (usually) the same networked computer, is called a site. Each page and site has its own unique Internet address, also called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Part of evaluating any Web site is determining the quality of the design. I have summarized below several sources which deal with stylistic and design considerations for producing Web pages. The criteria and advice which these sources give is not specific to any kind of Web page content, but can be applied across a whole range of purposes, including pages which are designed for teaching ESL. Some of it includes points which apply to traditional media, as well; in many ways, producing high quality Web pages is no different than producing good magazine articles, textbooks, brochures, or other kinds of print media. In both electronic and print publishing, good design includes good use of language, layout, and graphics in order to help the reader be able to easily access, understand, and remember the content.

In Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week, one of several available guide books for Web publishing, Lemay (1995) provides a chapter about things to do and things to avoid when publishing Web pages. She says that in many ways, writing for the Web is no different than writing for traditional text publication. For instance, it is important to be concise and clear, to use structural devices such as headers and lists to make it easy for the reader to find information, and to proofread. Finally, she advises the use of a consistent layout and design among related pages.

She also gives many design criteria which are specific to the Web, due to its online nature. For instance, because the speed of loading a Web page is based on the amount of memory taken by the page and the speed of the connection, which is often slow, especially if the viewer is using a modem, it is important to minimize the amount of memory taken by each page. This can be done by using only graphics which enhance the content, reducing the size of graphics, and by breaking up large amounts of text into separate, linked documents.

HTML gives authors the ability to put in as many different hyperlinks as are desired; however, it is possible to put in too many of them. According to Lemay, only links which serve some relevant purpose should be used. For instance, linking the word "coffee" which is included somewhere in a page about another topic, to another page about coffee, would be an excessive use of hyperlinks.

Several of Lemay's points relate to making Web pages and sites easy for the viewer to navigate. Using consistent page elements and navigation menus among pages on the same site helps the reader easily find his or her way around a site. Pages should always be linked back to the home page of the site. Finally, a balance must be struck between the use of many small pages with lots of links between them and a few large pages with few links; the approach taken will often be decided by the type of content.

Several "Top Ten" lists of guidelines for creating Web pages exist. One is contained in HTML for Dummies (Tittel and James 1995). The authors give their own version of the top ten "Do's and Don'ts" for HTML.

1. "Remember your content!" Everything else on the page exists to highlight the content.

2. "Structuring your documents." Give the users a clear roadmap.

3. "Keeping track of tags." Don't leave out the HTML markup tags to close commands.

4. "Making the most from the least." Don't use too many graphics, headings, or links.

5. "Building attractive pages." Make the framework consistent and easy to navigate.

6. "Avoiding browser dependencies." Different browsers view pages differently, so pages should be checked using a variety of browsers.

7. "Evolution, not revolution." Keep pages fresh by constant updating.

8. "Navigating your wild and woolly Web." Include navigational aids.

9. "Beating the two-dimensional text trap." Take advantage of hypertext's capabilities to enhance your content with links to cross-references, indices, or other tools.

10. "Overcoming inertia takes constant vigilance." Pages should be continuously maintained.

Tittel and James also write their top ten "design desiderata" for Web pages:

1. "Creating page layouts." Use a consistent layout, as attractive as possible without being distracting.

2. "Building a graphic vocabulary." It is better to use the same graphics many times on pages within your site, since they only need to load once.

3. "Using white space." About 20% of your page should be blank, to help the reader's eyes move more easily through the content.

4. "Formatting for impact." Use boldface, italics, etc., but do not overuse them, unless you want to "blunt the impact of your entire document."

5. "Enhancing content." Graphics, text, and other media should complement each other and make reference to one another.

6. "Making effective use of hypermedia." Do include such multimedia elements as pictures, videos, and sounds, but don't inflict a large download on users without advance notice.

7. "Aiding navigation." Include "outlines, tables of contents, indexes, or search engines" to aid user navigation.

8. "Forming good opinions." Be sure to add some way for users to give you feedback about improving the site.

9. "Knowing when to split." It may be better to divide long pages into several short ones, if the content is such that it is "touched quickly and exited immediately." On the other hand, if readers download it and then pore over it at length, it may be better to keep it in a single document.

10. "Adding value for value". Publicly acknowledge people who help you by giving advice and feedback; doing so will help develop allies from your users.

One guide published on the Web, Web Pages that Suck (Flanders 1996), is devoted to showing bad examples of Web page design in order that authors might avoid those mistakes. Flanders' major points about design may be broken down into three categories: 1. Avoiding pretension; 2. Avoiding excess; and 3. Avoiding problem technologies.

The initial page on Flanders' site has a large, black background with an animated picture on it and very small letters on which the viewer must click to get inside the rest of the site. This is his first example of pretension. According to Flanders, 95% of the people who use black backgrounds are trying to say that they are "cool." Other examples of pretension include asking viewers to change their browsers in order to view a page, using clichÈd designs, and taking up lots of space on a page to explain why and how that page and its author are really great.

Flanders goes to great lengths to explain how to avoid excess. The most often abused element of Web page layout is graphics. Too many graphics, especially too many animated ones, graphics as dividers, overly large graphics, bizarre background graphics, are all examples of excess. That these practices not only can make pages ugly but also make them take a long time to load makes avoiding excess on Web pages extremely important.

With respect to problem technologies, Flanders notes that certain HTML editing programs insert bad code into Web pages and should be avoided. He also says that frames (an HTML command which divides up Web pages into separate windows in the browser which can be viewed independently) should usually be avoided because they disrupt normal navigational methods, such as bookmarking and the use of the back function in most browsers. Flanders concedes, however, that designers who know what they are doing can, for certain purposes and audiences, make good use of frames; in fact, he himself uses them in his site. His advice is that people should only use frames if they know what they are doing.

Some of Flanders' miscellaneous points to avoid in Web design include outdated content, hiding important content in non-prominent areas, and poor color choice.

Many other Web style guides exist. One example is the Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide (Horton 1997). The Yale Guide has extensive style and design instructions. The author's purpose was to combine traditional editorial considerations with graphic, user interface, and information design guidelines for university personnel creating pages for the Web. The focus is on helping novice page editors create professional-looking documents, so its approach is conservative and guided. For instance, it emphasizes conservative use of colors and choosing functional, consistent graphics.

One point dealt with by the Yale guide is tailoring the design approach to the purpose of the site. They say that sites designed for teaching or education can be more complex and lengthy than sites for training or reference, because more time will be spent viewing them. Sites for self-directed education and reference can be less linear than sites for teaching and short training presentations.

It also says that self-directed education and reference sites should be less linear than teaching or training sites.

One of many sites on the Web for actual reviews of sites (of all types, not just ESL!) is the "Rate-O-Matic," by Yahoo! Internet Life (YIL) This site review page relies on the general public for entering reviews of Web sites. The page has a small window in which to enter the site URL, a description and comments, and six different criteria with pull-down menus for each from which the reviewer can select a rating from 1 to 10 (10 being the best). The six criteria prompts are:

Descriptors accompany the number ratings in each category; for instance, "Informative" ranges from "10: Wrote the book" to "1: Pointless."

Yahoo! Internet Lifeís opinion of what constitutes a good Web site is not as balanced as others; for instance, the editors seem to lack any consideration for the speed of loading. Under "Attractive," their lower ranks have titles like "bland" and "dull but functional," while their upper ranks have descriptors such as "Very striking." They seem to care more whether a site is flashy than if its graphic content slows down page loading excessively.

Other places on the Web where sites are reviewed include Magellan (www.mckinley.com) and Excite! (www.excite.com).

Excite! does not provide information about how its reviews are created; apparently, there is no formal set of criteria, but simply a four-star system (from "must see" to "if you're desperate") and a short, descriptive entry.

Magellan considers three primary factors in its rating system: depth of content, ease of exploration, and Net appeal:

Each factor is worth ten points, and the total number of points determines the number of stars given the site in its rating.

 

Identifying the Purpose of a Web Site

It is necessary to know the specific purpose of a teaching Web site in order to be able to make more relevant comparisons between it and other sites. In any evaluation system, comparing a numerical rating for two sites with different purposes may be misleading. So far, little published work exists addressing the issue of identifying and categorizing the purposes of Web sites for ESL teaching. However, at TESOL 1997, Douglas Mills presented a taxonomy of objectives for ESL Web sites, based on his experience of how teachers are actually using Web pages. Mills' seven categories are listed below:

1. Publishing Teacher Materials

2. Publishing Student Work

3. Linking to Resources...

  • For cultural, linguistic information, etc.

  • For OFF-line activities (composition, discussion, etc.)

  • For ON-line activities

4. Supporting Email Exchange Projects

5. Providing Students Feedback

6. Providing Language Practice

7. Teaching Internet Skills

Mills includes examples of Web sites fitting each category. An example of Publishing Teacher Materials is Ronís Online ESOL Classroom (Corio 1997), which includes links to announcements, in-class and homework assignments, course descriptions, and pictures and biographies of the teacher and his students. Corio's writing classes meet in a computer lab, so the students use the Web each class period to access announcements, the instructor's comments about their progress, and the day's assignment. Corio also publishes his students' essays on this site, but the main focus is distributing class information.

Exchange (1997) is a Web site devoted to publishing ESL student work and fostering cross-cultural understanding. Student work is grouped into various themes and students worldwide may submit their own material for publication by filling out a form online. This site also has some self-study materials for English learners.

Sites designed for linking to resources include lists of links and suggested activities related to those links. Resources for English Language and Culture (1997) includes dozens of links to outside sources and pages of information about social topics, such as censorship, AIDS, and smoking. It also has links to course syllabi for actual classes offered which deal with similar topics. Opportunities in ESL . . . theme-based pages (Opp-Beckman 1996) includes links for a number of themes designed to be used for discussion and composition starters. Other links lists, such as the Grammar Safari (Mills & Salzman 1997), include links and instructions for a variety of scavenger hunts for grammatical structures in electronically published works.

Various Web locations exist for supporting e-mail projects. Mills does not include a link to an example for this category, but one example is The California Email Project Home Page (Gaer 1996), which showcases projects created by classes using e-mail. Another example is The eIALC: E-Mail Project (Sachs & Nelson 1997), which is a bulletin board devoted to linking classes at the Intensive American Language Center with classes elsewhere in the world for e-mail exchanges.

Using HTML for Online Editing (Bowers 1997) is a demo of how student papers may be submitted as Web pages and then corrected by the teacher while using a Web browser. The student may then read the corrections and comments alongside the original paper, all online.

Mills provides several examples of Web sites under the category "Provide Language Practice." One is The Internet TESL Journal's "Self-Study Quizzes for ESL Students." Over 300 quizzes on a variety of subjects exist on this site. The quizzes allow the students to read a question, think of the answer, and then uncover the hidden answer.

Finally, some Web sites exist for the purpose of teaching Internet skills to ESL students; for example, the course pages of EnglishNet: Exploring the World-Wide Web (Hammersmith 1997). This is the home page for a course teaching Internet use and authoring skills (along with some English) to ESL students. The course pages include some publishing of teacher materials, feedback to students, assignments, and Internet tutorial pages.

An informal survey which I posted on February 20, 1997 to the mailing list NETEACH-L about types of pedagogical uses to which teachers put their own Web sites yielded the following responses (see Appendix C for the complete text of my posting and these responses):

Other information from these responses indicated that the teachers use their Web pages both for student self-access and supervised access during class time. Having class materials on the Web was viewed as an advantage because students sometimes miss class or need to review, and can do so easily when materials are accessible on the Web.

The teachers who responded to my message also mentioned uses that were not directly mentioned in Mills' taxonomy. Hoter and Lund were using Web pages to facilitate not just e-mail exchanges but Web-based bulletin-board message exchanges and other types of interclass projects (which are also mentioned by Corio on his site).

In addition to the taxonomy above, it is also important to consider which types of language skills are being developed by the Web-based activity. Hunt (1993) listed four types of modalities: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. To these I have added grammar, vocabulary, and cultural knowledge. These are the basic categories of language skills that an activity or Web site may be designed to improve, and are also the basic skills by which ESL courses are generally classified.

Evaluative criteria and taxonomic elements in this chapter form the basis for the system detailed in the next chapter.

 


CHAPTER 3: EVALUATION SYSTEM FOR ESL WEB SITES

 

In creating this system for evaluating Web pages designed to teach ESL, I have attempted to create a concise, user-friendly, yet thorough system which allows teachers to easily and quickly make intelligent evaluations of Web sites designed for teaching ESL.

The system is divided into four parts: (1) Purpose, (2) Pedagogy, (3) Design/Construction, and (4) Description/Other. For each part, there are several criteria. The reviewer, using the Web page for evaluation, selects among different choices for each criterion. When the reviewer is finished, he or she clicks on a button at the bottom of the form, causing the Web browser to submit the form data, which is then stored in ESL Interactive's server computer. The data may then be accessed from the search or browse page of the ESL Interactive site.

Purpose

Language-teaching Web sites have different goals and intended uses. They also vary in the scope and type of audience. Sometimes the primary audience for a site is intended to be just one class or a group of classes for a particular teacher or program; often, however, the target audience is worldwide. ESL sites exist which are designed for certain language levels, and others which do not claim to be for any specific level. It is important to consider a siteís purpose, since meaningful comparisons of evaluations can best be made among sites with the same or at least similar intended goals, uses, and audiences.

Skills

The first thing this Web site evaluation system considers is the type(s) of skills which the site builds. The reviewer may select any and all which apply, out of this list:

  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Listening
  • Speaking
  • Grammar
  • Vocabulary
  • Cultural Knowledge

Objectives

Millsí taxonomy, adapted and expanded, forms the basis for the objectives in the evaluation system. The objectives in the list are:

  • Publishing course materials (syllabus, assignments, etc.)
  • Publishing student work
  • Linking to resources
    • For cultural or linguistic information
    • For off-line activities (composition, discussion, etc.)
    • For on-line activities
  • Supporting interchange
    • via e-mail
    • via bulletin board
  • Providing student feedback
  • Providing language practice
  • Providing language tutorials
  • Teaching Internet skills

The evaluation system allows the evaluator to choose one of these as the primary objective and any number of others as secondary objectives. The reason that the system requires the evaluator to choose one primary objective is that many Web sites have more than one major section each with a distinct objective. The reviewers are thus encouraged to focus on sections of sites with a single objective, rather than on entire sites with multiple objectives making for a more concise review from a pedagogicalstand point. A side benefit of this is that categorization by primary objective is made easier in a database program.

Scope of Audience

These are the choices for the site's intended audience scope:

  • Specific class(es)
  • A school/institution
  • Regional
  • Worldwide

Target Level

The evaluator can select from among four choices of target levels:

  • Beginning
  • Intermediate
  • Advanced
  • Multiple levels

Pedagogy

The system uses six categories drawn from pedagogical theory and practice: Instructions, Feedback, Sensory input, Interactivity, Communicativeness, and Context.

Design/Construction

The evaluation system includes several criteria for evaluating Web site design and construction: content, revisitability, appearance, navigation, load speed, and technical (HTML) quality.

Content

Good Web pages are created in such a way as to make the delivery of content their primary focus. Interesting, relevant, original, and high-quality content is the primary draw for popular Web pages. The choices under this category are designed to quickly assess the quantity and quality of the content in terms of how long a viewer could spend looking at the site without becoming bored. The choices are:

  • An hour or more. (This site contains a remarkably large amount of top-notch, engrossing, highly relevant content.)
  • 10 minutes. (This site has a significant but not remarkable amount of good content.)
  • 30 seconds. (There's a little bit of somewhat worthwhile stuff here.)
  • 2 seconds. (Practically nothing worthwhile or interesting is on this site.)

Revisitability

How often could a member of the target audience come back to this site and find it fresh or useful? Will people only visit it once and count it a waste of their time? Or is it a site that one would probably visit again every month, week, or even every day?

The choices from which the evaluator can select are:

  • Once a day or more. (This site has daily or more-often updated material or large amounts of useful references and probably also a continually fresh look.)
  • Once a week. (Not updated daily, but probably about once a week, and generally feels fresh.)
  • Once a month. (Occasionally updated with interesting or useful material, but is somewhat plagued by outdated content and/or links.)
  • Once and never again! (The site is obviously a waste of time, and probably seldom if ever updated.)

Note that many factors can affect revisitability. Content which is frequently being added to or updated is the primary factor contributing to revisitability. If the site has bulletin-board type features (such as the ESL Message Exchange on Dave's ESL Café), revisitability is enhanced because people other than the site's owner can post messages at any time of the day.

Some sites are frequently updated, whereas for others the last update was so long ago that the content is obviously outdated.

Also note that some sites are updated automatically and change every day or more frequently, which is an advantage as well; even if such automatic updates are only cosmetic, they give the site a fresh feeling each time. For instance, Dave's ESL Café has an automatic system which displays fresh quotes for each day and different graphics at the top of the page on each visit.

There are several ways to tell how often a site is updated. First, many Webmasters put a footnote on each page telling the date when it was last updated. Second, the presence of a bulletin-board feature indicates frequent updating, depending on how much the bulletin board is used. The final method is to visit the site several times over a period of up to a month to determine how often the site is updated.

Appearance

Of course, good Web sites should look good, too. Many elements contribute to the overall appearance: for instance, consistency, lack of excess clutter, good use of white space, legibility, and generally pleasing or striking use of colors and graphics. Note that while graphics are an important aspect, a large number of graphics (especially animated ones) is not necessarily good and may in fact create a cluttered appearance.

The reviewer's choices include:

  • Excellent. (The site has an extremely functional, consistent, and clean or strikingly beautiful appearance, which may indicate either a well-executed professional design or a strikingly fresh or friendly design.)
  • Good. (The site makes above average use of all the design elements but is not outstanding.)
  • Average. (While the site has a functional look and no major flaws in appearance, it is either plain or somewhat marred by slight design flaws.)
  • Ugly. (The site has one or more glaring flaws in appearance; for instance, too many animated graphics.)
  • Hideous. (Extremely poor choices of graphics or color either make the site unreadable or nauseating.)

Navigation

The evaluator is asked to evaluate the ease of navigation on the site. On a site which is easy to navigate, it should be possible to reach any content page with minimum keystrokes and confusion. This is especially important on large sites, on which a user may become literally lost in hyperspace unless certain navigational aids are included. Some of these aids include clearly marked navigational links on each page, an index, and a search function. Some flaws which can detract from a page's navigational ease include orphan pages (pages without links back to another page within the site), broken links (links which lead nowhere), an excessive number of intermediary pages lacking content, and an unclear organizational pattern.

The evaluator answers the question, "How easy is it to find your way (navigate) on this site?" The choices are:

  • Easy (Very clear navigational aids and easy and quick to find specific pages.)
  • Fairly easy (Generally clear navigational aids and usually quick and easy to find pages.)
  • Somewhat difficult (Some problems or lack of useful aids)
  • Difficult (Frequent problems, sometimes useless or missing navigational aids)
  • Impossible (Pervasive problems and no or useless navigational aids)

Load speed

Even if a Web page does everything else well, if it takes too long to load, potential viewers may just look elsewhere. Of course, what exactly "too long" is can vary and is relative to a number of factors. First, it is relative to the speed of the user's connection to the Internet. Evaluators should judge the general speediness of a site in comparison to the speed of other sites given the same connection speed. Second, it is relative to the amount of content on the page. For instance, waiting thirty seconds or even a minute for a page to load may be acceptable if it has a generous amount of interesting content; however, waiting thirty seconds just to be able to click again to go somewhere else is certainly excessive.

While a site designer cannot control the speed of the audience's Internet connections, he or she can control the size of the files on the site by not overusing graphics, editing graphics to reduce the amount of memory they take, and breaking up large text files into separate pages. Smaller files always mean a shorter load time.

The question the evaluator must answer is: "In general, how fast do the pages on this site load?"

  • Fast (The site loads faster than most pages, or it may load surprisingly fast despite having several prominent graphics.)
  • Fairly fast (While the site may have pages that are somewhat long or has a few too many graphics, it still is fairly fast.)
  • Somewhat slow (The site takes a noticeably long time to load due to excessive graphics or file size, or perhaps due to an antiquated server system.)
  • Annoyingly slow (Some pages are almost impossible to load because of excessive length and/or graphic sizes. Many or all pages on this site load so slowly as to make the site difficult to use.)

Technical (HTML) quality

One important element of site design and construction is the quality of the HTML code. Errors can include such things as missing HTML tags or poor use of HTML features such as frames. Other errors can be caused by a lack of attention to compatibility for different browsers; for instance, sometimes Internet Explorer 3.0 interprets code differently than Netscape Navigator 3.0. The site designer should look at the site in several popular browsers to ensure that it looks okay in all of them.

The evaluator's choices for the question "The technical (HTML) quality of this site is:"

  • Problem-free (no noticeable errors)
  • Glitchy (occasional minor or harmless errors)
  • Problematic (serious errors hurting the site's utility and/or appearance)

Description/Open-Ended

In addition to multiple choice questions, this evaluation system has an essay section.

There are two questions: one, a general prompt, provides a space where the evaluator can write a general description of the site's content, explain the way he or she evaluated the site, give additional information, and make any other relevant comments.

The other prompt asks the evaluator to consider how this site does things which could not be done using other formats, such as print media or multimedia computer software. In other words, how does this site use capabilities and features which are unique to the Web? The purpose of this prompt is to address the need to justify using the Web at all. Why use the Web if non-networked computer-based methods, or even traditional print media would suffice? The Web is unique in its capabilities which can be taken advantage of to enhance language learning. For instance, materials designers should utilize the Web's capabilities of presenting materials in a multi-media format. Pictures, sound, even video can be integrated into materials. Sites can be made interactive, so that the students can actually do something, not just browse. Web pages can even be set up for communication among different people. If these benefits of the Web are not utilized, the only advantage to Web materials is ease of distribution.

The Overall Ratings

A formula is used to calculate the overall rating, from zero to five stars, of the Web site. First, all the criteria for the pedagogical and design/construction categories are converted from text to numbers. The following table shows the numerical equivalents of each possible answer for each criterion.

 

Pedagogical Criteria

       

Instructions:

Very clear

Mostly clear

Unclear

Nonexistent

How clear are the instructions?

5

3

1

0

Aspects of multimedia:

Very effectively

Effectively

Poorly

Not at all

Is text used effectively?

5

3

1

0

Are graphics used effectively?

5

3

1

0

Is sound used effectively?

5

3

1

0

Is video used effectively?

5

3

1

0

Interactivity:

Lots

Some

Very little

None

How much interactivity is there?

5

3

1

0

Communicativeness:

       

How much can the user send and/or receive messages from real people?

5

3

1

0

Context:

       

How much of a motivating context is there for the language which is presented?

5

3

1

0

TABLE 1. Values for Pedagogical Criteria

 

Design/Construction Criteria

         

Content:

an hour or more

a half hour

10 minutes

5 minutes

5 minutes

There is enough material on this site to occupy a language learner for:

5

4

2

1

0

Revisitability:

once a day or more

once a week

once a month

once and never again!

 

How often could a language learner benefit from returning to this site?

5

4

2

0

 

Appearance:

very attractive

good

plain

ugly

hideous

How does this site look?

5

4

3

1

0

Navigation:

easy

fairly easy

somewhat difficult

difficult

impossible

How easy is it for you to find your way (navigate) on this site?

5

3

2

1

0

Load speed:

fast

fairly fast

somewhat slow

annoyingly slow

 

In general, how fast do the pages on this site load?

5

3

1

0

 

Technical quality:

problem-free

glitchy

problematic

   

The technical (HTML) quality of this site is:

5

2

0

   

TABLE 2. Values for Design/Construction Criteria

 

Next, separate pedagogical and design/construction ratings are calculated by averaging all the criteria in those categories (except for the four elements of the pedagogical category Sensory Input, which are all weighted at one-fourth normal value and averaged together). The value for the pedagogical criteria is added to the value for the design/construction criteria, divided by two, and rounded off to the nearest whole number to arrive at an overall rating.

The numerical rating is intended to be used as a general guide to quality relative to other sites of similar purpose and scope. Comparing the ratings for vastly different sites will be less informative than comparing the ratings for sites which have similar purposes.

A Web site has been created which allows reviews to be entered and stored in a database for unrestricted access. The database program automatically calculates and stores the numerical ratings, as well. The Web site, titled ESL Interactive, is detailed in a subsequent chapter.

The next chapter contains samples of actual reviews which were created using this system and entered into the ESL Interactive database.


CHAPTER 4: REVIEWS

 

All the following sample evaluations of ESL Web sites were created by the author of this paper, using the evaluation system detailed in the previous chapter, and were entered into the ESL Interactive site review database.

Review: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center

This review is of a subsection of Dave's ESL Café, the Quiz Center. The Quiz Center is a Web page which includes about 50 quizzes on various topics; for instance, there are 17 quizzes on grammar alone (see figure , below), enough to occupy an ESL learner for several hours.

 

Figure 1. 17 grammar quizzes

 

The quizzes are arranged as forms with multiple-choice questions. The user clicks the mouse to select an answer.

 

Figure 2. Sample grammar quiz form (answered correctly)

 

Figure 3. Sample grammar quiz form (answered incorrectly)

 

When the student finishes a quiz, he or she may then click on a button to submit the quiz form. Within a few seconds, a new screen appears showing each question and answer, and the percentage correct. In this example, the first question has been answered correctly, whereas the second was not. The incorrect answer is marked by an X.

 

Figure 4. Sample grammar quiz (correct answers revealed)

 

The figures below show the review of this site as it appears on the ESL Interactive Web site. The first part is the descriptive information and overall rating.

 

Figure 5. Description: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center

 

The Purpose portion of the review follows.

Figure 6. Purpose: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center

 

Next is the Pedagogy section, with the Pedagogy rating in stars in the header. While the site has a large number of quizzes, which are basically well-written, it does not take advantage of the capability of the Web to enrich the student's sensory input with graphics, sound, or video. It also is not communicative, and not all of the quizzes have a unifying context. This site is a good example of what computers were mainly used for in language teaching in the 1980's, while CALL designers were basing their approaches on behaviorist theories of language learning, even though teachers were by then using communicative approaches in the classroom.

 

Figure 7. Pedagogy: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center

 

The design and construction of this site is one of its best aspects. Not only is there a large amount of useful content, but it is added to from time to time with new quizzes. Due to the simple but clean layout, well-chosen colors and sparing but attractive use of graphics, the site has a very attractive look. The site also loads fast, due to the low number of graphics and the apparent high speed of the server on which the site resides.

 

Figure 8. Design/Construction: Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center

 

Review: Dave's ESL Café Help Center

Another feature of Dave's ESL Café is the Help Center. This is a Web-based bulletin board on which students can post questions about English. Teachers volunteer to post answers to the questions.

Students use the form shown below to post their questions.

 

Figure 9. Help Center Question Form.

 

The questions appear in a list such as the one below. Responses to questions are indented.

 

Figure 10. Sample question list

 

By clicking on a question or its follow-up, a screen such as the one below appears with the text of the question. This is the text of a teacher's follow-up to the question about "deep-six." Note that 40 minutes passed from the student's original message to the teacher's follow-up.

 

Figure 11. Response to student question

 

The teacher was able to not only tell the student the origin of the vocabulary item, but also to explain what it meant in the context of the student's example. Since semantic parsing is so complex, this is still one area in which the human brain can outperform any computer.

The description section for my review of the Help Center section of Dave's ESL Café is below.

 

Figure 12. Description: Dave's ESL Café Help Center

 

The Purpose section is below.

Figure 13. Purpose: Dave's ESL Café Help Center

 

The Help Center receives a high rating overall for Pedagogy because it is highly interactive with a set of well-chosen communicative features and human resources in the form of many enthusiastic teachers who make the site work.

Figure 14. Pedagogy: Dave's ESL Café Help Center

 

As with other sections on Dave's ESL Café, design and construction is a strong point. The only flaw on the Help Center is that the initial page loads too slowly, which might frustrate some students.

 

Figure 15. Design/Construction: Dave's ESL Café Help Center

 

Review: Planet English Interactive Lessons

The Planet English Interactive Lessons section contains a combination of lessons and interactive quizzes designed to instruct ESL learners in grammatical constructions appropriate for their level. At present, there are two lessons available, one for the beginner level and one for intermediate. The beginner-level lesson menu is shown below.

 

Figure 16. Instructions and beginner-level lesson menu

 

There are five elements in this menu; the first, the "Lesson," introduces the grammatical construction of the verb "to be" with examples.

 

Figure 17. Lesson

 

The second page gives the rules for the construction, along with more examples.

 

Figure 18. Rule

 

After the examples comes a series of three quizzes. The quiz below allows the student to conjugate the verb for each pronoun and then click a button to see whether the answers were correct. Unfortunately, this feature is not working; instead of seeing corrected answers, the student sees a cryptic error message and no explanation of why it is not working.

 

Figure 19. Activity 1

 

This last quiz combines a lack of interactivity with vague instructions.

 

Figure 20. Vague, uninteractive activity

 

This section of Planet English is a great idea with room for improvement in its implementation. From looking at other sections of Planet English, it is apparent that the designer has planned for growth by adding sections which allow other teachers from all over the world to add their own interactive quizzes to the site. In contrast to this section, the interactive quiz section has much more content and no programming problems. The site will even keep a permanent record of students' scores on each quiz. However, it is still somewhat difficult for students to understand how to use, since registration is required in order to use the quizzes, and the instructions for registering are not always obvious. This site will be improved if the designer addresses these problems.

Here is my review of the Planet English Interactive Lesson section, as entered into the ESL Interactive database.

 

Figure 21. Description: Planet English Interactive Lessons

 

Figure 22. Purpose: Planet English Interactive Lessons

 

 

Figure 23. Pedagogy: Planet English Interactive Lessons

 

Figure 24. Design/Construction: Planet English Interactive Lessons

 

Obviously, the Planet English Web site is still undergoing construction and refinement; it should be reviewed again later when it is in a more complete state.

Review: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner

The CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner is a site designed to support a class activity in which the students are given the task of planning an imaginary vacation, given constraints on money and time. The site includes notes for the teacher, a planning worksheet on which the students may record their anticipated expenses, and a list of links to other sites on the Web where information such as airline, hotel, and food prices may be found. The designer of this site, Michael Feldman of Boston University, recommends having the students do this Web-based research project collaboratively in small groups, and then following it up with a public-speaking exercise in which each small group attempts to convince the rest of the class that their vacation destination is the one to which the entire class should go together.

Here is the main screen of the Vacation Planner. Note that it is divided up into frames, which are subdivisions of the screen which may be individually scrolled through. The frame on the left is for navigation; links to the individual subsections of the frame on the bottom right appear there. The top frame contains a link back to the intensive English program at Boston University and a link to the teacher's guide for this section. The largest (bottom-right) frame contains links to pages with airline, hotel, and other travel information.

 

Figure 25. CELOP Virtual Vacation Planner

 

The review follows:

 

Figure 26. Description: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner

 

 

Figure 27. Purpose: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner

 

 

Figure 28. Pedagogy: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner

 

 

Figure 29. Design/Construction: CELOP Virtual Vacation Travel Planner

 

Review: Weather in the USA

This thematic Web page, part of the Otetsudai Company's Web site (http://www.otetsudai.com), contains material to help students learn language about the weather. One of the site's strength is using multimedia such as relevant graphics and sound. There are not only written

Figure 30. Sound buttons
dialogues but also spoken phrases which can be listened to by clicking on a button. This site, however, does not have any instructions, meaning that some learners might have trouble figuring out what to do with it if using it by themselves. It would best be used by a class supervised by a teacher.

The review follows.


Figure 31. Description: Weather in the USA

 


Figure 32. Purpose: Weather in the USA

 


Figure 33. Pedagogy: Weather in the USA

 


Figure 34. Design/Construction: Weather in the USA

 

The reviews are stored in a database which is accessed through the Web site, ESL Interactive, which is explained in the next chapter.

 



CHAPTER 5: THE WEB SITE ESL INTERACTIVE

 

Purpose

This site on the World-Wide Web serves as a centralized repository of information about other Web sites, particularly those designed to teach ESL. Previously, there has been a dearth of evaluative information available for teachers who were interested in using the Web to teach English. Although many large links lists exist, most do not have any annotative or evaluative information, meaning that a teacher searching for sites would have to visit each one on his or her own in order to determine its quality or usefulness. In addition, there has been little scholarly discussion so far in the field of ESL regarding the quality of the Web sites used to teach the English language. This Web site exists to provide easily-accessed information about ESL Web sites using a review system which links pedagogical theory and takes into account the capabilities of the Web for language learning.

 

Structure of the Site

ESL Interactive is organized with first a front page, called the index or home page. The index page (http://www.ialc.wsu.edu/eslint/eirevs/eirevs.html)
Errata:
The EI index page is now at http://www.ialc.wsu.edu/eslint/eslindex.html.
contains a header, welcome message, and a brief descriptor of the site's purpose. From the index page, a visitor can investigate rated sites in two ways: by searching by various parameters, or by checking out the Top 20 list, a selection of the best 20 sites, as evaluated by the administrator of the site (presently, the author of this paper). There is also a page with information about applying to become an official member of the ESL Interactive team, and an interactive form which may be filled out to apply. Finally, a review page with a fill-out form allows members of the team to submit reviews to the searchable database.

 

Technical Information

ESL Interactive is being served by a Macintosh Quadra 605 with a 1 GB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM. Current value of this hardware is under $1000.

The server software is currently WebSTAR 2.0 (by StarNine). Other software is used to enhance the site, including NetCloak 2.0 (used for on-the-fly alterations of the site's appearance) and NetForms 2.0 (which helps process interactive forms), both by Maxum Corp. Even more crucial than those two, however, is the duo of WebFM and FileMaker Pro 3.0. FileMaker Pro is Claris Corporation's relational database software for Macintosh, and WebFM is software which allows those databases to be queried by Web browsers and served onto Web pages. The reviews for ESL Interactive are stored in a database file in FileMaker Pro and HTML forms, linked to WebFM, query the database both for searching and for adding (and eventually for updating) new records.

 

Future Expansions

In the future, ESL Interactive will undergo several expansions. First, more information about pedagogy will be added, from the text of this paper, and a section for posting discussion about the system. In addition, several other types of databases could be added; for instances, reviews of Web sites for teachers, reviews of sites not necessarily designed for ESL, and lesson plans using Web sites.


CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION/CONCLUSIONS

 

Improving ESL Web Sites

Several lessons and conclusions about improving ESL Web sites can be drawn from the survey of site reviews. First, there is a mixture of pedagogical approaches used in ESL Web sites, and a variety of ways to improve sites' pedagogy. Many Web sites for ESL are still using techniques (for instance, most online quizzes) that are thoroughly embedded in behaviorist traditions such as audiolingualism, rather than communicative approaches. However, there are other sites which do contain freely accessible communicativity; for instance, with chat or bulletin-board features. Another sites are communicative because they include instructions for using the site in class in a communicative way. The Travel Planner (Feldman 1997) is an example of this. The students use the online links to do collaborative research and then the teacher has them give short talks about their research. The pedagogy of many ESL Web sites would be improved by building in communicative features.

Next, few ESL Web sites fully utilize the capabilities of the Web to enhance the language learning experience through multimedia and interactivity. For example, Dave's ESL Café Quiz Center does not contain any graphics for content delivery, but only text. (While there are graphics on Dave's ESL Café, these graphics do not enhance the content, but only the overall appearance of the site.) Sound and video are not used, either. The Quiz Center could be enhanced greatly by adding quizzes that incorporate graphics, sound, and even video. This would enrich the students' language learning experience. Likewise, there are other sites, such as Planet English and the Longman Dictionaries site (1997) which have some exercises that lack programmed interactivity.

There are several reasons why not all ESL Web sites take full advantage of the technology's capability. First, teachers may be unaware of the benefits for their students in increasing the richness of their sensory input. Second, teachers don't have the time or money to invest in training (Frizler 1995). Learning new technological skills is a challenge. Also, unlike writing textbooks, creating public-access materials on the Web is not a good way to make extra money (unless one's site becomes so popular that selling advertising space becomes lucrative). Next, while all computers are able to process text, the ability to create or acquire and manipulate graphics, sounds, and video may not be readily accessible. Also, adding multimedia to a Web site requires additional time, energy, and planning. Finally, another reason is that the Web is not really the ideal medium for presenting rich multimedia (Mills 1997), because every sound, video, or graphic must be downloaded before playing or viewing it, and the process of downloading can be slow, depending on the speed of one's connection to the Internet. However, more and more schools are acquiring access to the Internet through high-speed, dedicated lines, so this should be less and less of a problem as time goes on. Furthermore, even though, for instance, downloading a spoken sentence is not as fast as loading it from one's computer's hard drive or CD-ROM, it is often faster than searching through a cassette tape for a specific sound clip by fast-forwarding and rewinding. Also, once downloaded, sounds or videos may also be replayed at will without having to be downloaded a second time.

High-quality, multimedia-rich, Web-based materials are equally useful, legitimate projects for teachers to work on as traditional, text-based materials. Therefore, administrators should give release time and funding for those projects. Also, just as teachers receive compensation from publishers for their efforts in textbook writing, teachers who are interested in writing materials for the Web but need financial incentive to do so should be shown ways to receive some kind of compensation for their efforts; for instance, by selling advertising or finding ways of charging for access.

Another way of developing Web sites is to use the Web's capability to facilitate collaboration among hundreds of people across the globe. The sites which have the most content seem to be those which are developed collaboratively by a number of people. For instance, Dave's ESL Café has thousands of messages posted by teachers and students, and many quizzes which were developed by different teachers and then posted by the site's owner. Planet English has gone one step further and includes an online form with which teachers can enter quizzes and publish them instantly on the Web. This kind of worldwide collaboration holds promise for adding greatly to the quantity of content of instructional ESL Web sites. However, there is a downside. Web sites which are opened up with unsecured interactive forms allow very little quality control, since anybody can enter anything and publish it immediately. Planet English has ameliorated this somewhat by requiring teachers to register in a database and then log in with their own username and password before being allowed to publish on the site. Another approach is to require human intervention before allowing new users to publish on a Web site; this slows down the process of adding new users but increases the security. This second approach has been taken by Dave Sperling of the ESL Café, who now requires that teachers wishing to contribute to the ESL Help Center first send him e-mail explaining why they would like to participate, after which he sends them security information allowing them to make contributions. This approach also increases the reliability and quality of submitted material. In addition, restricting access increases the prestige of having published material on the site, since contributors must first qualify.

The restricted-access approach to developing Web sites collaboratively can be taken one step further by expanding the amount of human intervention to include not only a review of each contributor's credentials but also an expert review of each submission. This would not only increase the quality of the materials but also permit the prestige of the site (and the professional recognition for contributors) to approach or equal that of a refereed academic journal.

 

Limitations of the Review System

There are limitations to the review system which has been outlined in this paper. Some of these are inherent limitations due to the Web's nature as a fluid, constantly changing medium. It is impossible for reviews to stay completely up-to-date because many Web pages are changing constantly. The content of many sites is frequently updated and expanded. Furthermore, Web addresses can change without advance notice. For example, during the research for this paper, within a week of reviewing some features of Planet English, the entire site had moved to a new address. Therefore, like any endeavor on the Web, maintaining an accurate, up-to-date database of site reviews will require much time and energy.

Another limitation of the review system in this paper is that, while there are many potential uses to which a large database of reviews could be put, as of this writing the size of the review database is still tiny. The review database will expand as teachers contribute to its contents.

With respect to the growth of the database, another limitation of this system is that the method of access restriction for reviewers has not yet been finalized. As stated previously, there are three potential degrees of access restriction when developing Web sites collaboratively. When using interactive forms to generate content on Web sites, the owner of the site can choose to allow unrestricted access, to limit access to persons who qualify, or to not only limit access to qualified people but also to review the content of their submissions prior to publication. While it is probable that limiting access would increase the overall quality and consistency of submissions, it is unknown whether any of these three approaches to developing Web sites collaboratively would necessarily result in a larger quantity of submissions. An unrestricted-access approach would make it easier for people to make submissions and would require less effort for the owner of the site, but would not give contributors the benefits of professional recognition which would come from limiting contributions such as is the practice with refereed academic journals; thus, even though contributing may be easy with an unrestricted-access approach, even more people might contribute if given the incentive of professional recognition. Therefore, ESL Interactive, if operated under the most restricted access approach, in which not only contributors but also contributions are screened, might attract more contributors than if access were unrestricted. If the site takes this form, it would essentially be managed like an electronic, refereed journal.

A further benefit of restricting access and reviewing submissions is that it would help make the reviews more consistent. Since the reviewer may be the biggest variable with respect to the accuracy and consistency of reviews, that this system is designed to be used by a large number of people is another potential limitation. Since the review process is somewhat subjective, a large number of reviewers could cause the reviews to be inconsistent. However, the site owner may alleviate the effect of reviewer differences by requiring potential reviewers to first read instructions explaining the review system and by reserving the right to expunge reviews which do not properly apply the review system. The site owner could inform review authors that they need to make certain changes in their reviews, for instance, and then after a reasonable time limit edit or expunge inconsistent reviews. (This system could also be applied to eliminate or revise outdated reviews.)

Finally, an arbitrary limitation of the review system is that it only applies to ESL Web sites which are specifically intended for student use. It does not deal with sites intended for teacher use, nor does it deal with Web sites which may be useful for teaching or learning English but are not specifically designed for that purpose. Also, teacher intervention can allow a site to be used communicatively that was not originally designed that way. For instance, an on-line quiz could be made communicative by pairing students and having them choose answers together. The point is that a good teacher is as important as good materials (good materials do, however, ease the teacher's burden). Other review systems could be created for these other types of Web sites, and databases of reviews using these systems could be made accessible on the Web.

 

Benefits of this Review System

This review system will benefit the ESL profession in a number of ways. First, the data gathered on this Web site will allow study of trends in Web design for ESL. One potential research project would be to show the proportions of the various purposes and audiences for ESL Web pages. Analysis of the proportion of different uses to which ESL teachers are putting their Web sites could show meaningful comparisons between ESL and other disciplines, as well as provide useful information for companies or institutions providing Web services to educators. Another study would involve gathering data on the popularity of various sites to reach conclusions about what students and teachers like, and what makes them come back to a Web site. (This could be useful information for all Webmasters at educational institutions.) Further research through this review system could also provide evidence for the need for training of educators in the enhancement of educational Web site and the need for greater funding if the Web is to be utilized to its potential.

Finally, the most important benefit of this review system is that it contributes to a growing trend in the field of ESL to link current pedagogical theory with actual practice in the use of computers for teaching language. As Conrad (1996) wrote, throughout the 1980's CALL designers did not base their work in up-to-date theory, which contributed to a general dissatisfaction with computers in education which was developing at the time. Fortunately, this is changing; for instance, the evaluation system proposed by Goldstein and Gray (1996) contains many elements in common with the Proficiency Approach. Another problem with CALL has been that educators have taken a "narrow view" (Hunt 1993) of what can be done with computer technology. This review system will help educators understand how to take advantage of the Web's potential for active language learning. Because this review system will be available to anyone over the Web, teachers will be able to use it to educate themselves about how pedagogical theory and the technology of the Web can be used to improve teaching and learning, and make informed choices about choosing and designing Web sites to use with their classes.

 


APPENDIX A

Omaggio's Hypotheses

Alice Omaggio's five hypotheses form a basic set of guidelines for teaching language communicatively using the Proficiency Approach.

"Hypothesis 1. Opportunities must be provided for students to practice using language in a range of contexts likely to be encountered in the target culture.

Corollary 1. Students should be encouraged to express their own meaning as early as possible after productive skills have been introduced in the course of instruction.

Corollary 2. A proficiency-oriented approach promotes active communicative interaction among students.

Corollary 3. Creative language practice (as opposed to exclusively manipulative or convergent practice) must be encouraged in the proficiency-oriented classroom.

Corollary 4. Authentic language should be used in instruction wherever and whenever possible.

Hypothesis 2. Opportunities should be provided for students to practice carrying out a range of functions (task universals) likely to be necessary in dealing with others in the target culture.

Hypothesis 3. There should be concern for the development of linguistic accuracy from the beginning of instruction in a proficiency-oriented approach.

Hypothesis 4. Proficiency-oriented approaches should respond to the affective needs of students as well as to their cognitive needs. Students should feel motivated to learn and must be given opportunities to express their own meanings in a nonthreatening environment.

Hypothesis 5. Cultural understanding must be promoted in various ways so that students are prepared to live more harmoniously in the target-language community" (Omaggio 35-36).

 


APPENDIX B

Evaluative Criteria of Microsift Evaluators Guide

(Squires & McDougall 1994, pp. 120-125)

CONTENT:

1. The content is accurate.

2. The content has educational value.

3. The content is free of race, ethnic, sex, and other stereotypes.

INSTRUCTIONAL QUALITY:

4. The purpose of the package is well-defined.

5. The package achieves its defined purpose.

6. Presentation of content is clear and logical.

7. The level of difficulty is appropriate for the target audience.

8. Graphics/color/sound are used for appropriate instructional reason.

9. Use of the package is motivational.

10. The package effectively stimulates student creativity.

11. Feedback on student responses is effectively employed.

12. The learner controls the rate and sequence of presentation and review.

13. Instruction is integrated with previous student experience.

. . .

TECHNICAL QUALITY

15. The user support materials are comprehensive.

16. The user support materials are effective.

17. Information displays are effective.

18. Intended users can easily and independently operate the program.

19. Teachers can easily employ the package.

20. The program appropriately uses relevant computer capabilities.

21. The program is reliable in normal use.

. . .

[OTHER:]

23. Describe the major strengths of this package.

24. Describe the major weaknesses of this package.

25. Describe the potential use of the package in classroom settings.

 


APPENDIX C

Informal Survey on NETEACH-L

 

On February 20, 1997, I posted the following request for information on the mailing list NETEACH-L and received several responses. My original post and the responses are printed in full below. (Horizontal lines show separations between individual messages.)

Resent-from: nelso891@hickory.csrv.uidaho.edu Resent-to: jtnelson@mail.wsu.edu

Resent-Date: Fri, 14 Feb 97 11:06:44 PST8PDT Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 11:05:45 -0800 (PST) X-Authentication-Warning: thecity.sfsu.edu: Host localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol Reply-To: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

Originator: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

Sender: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

Precedence: bulk

From: "Jeffrey T. Nelson" <jtnelson@mail.wsu.edu> To: Multiple recipients of list <neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu> Subject: Uses of Web for ESL

X-Comment: Frizzy University Network

Status: RO

X-Status:

Greetings all,

I'm interested in asking a couple of questions which relate to some work I'm doing for my thesis on the evaluation of Web pages for ESL.

If you have created Web pages to help students learn English, have you done them for the purpose of 1) student self-access or 2) supervised access during class time?

Also, have you had students look at Web pages during a class meeting? How about as homework? Do you do group activities centered around Web pages?

These are important issues since the purpose of a page should help govern how it is evaluated.

Jeff Nelson, Assistant Technology Coordinator Intensive American Language Center, Washington State University jtnelson@mail.wsu.edu, http://www.ialc.wsu.edu/

Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 12:55:11 -0700 (MST) From: GREG YOUNGER <youngerg@spot.Colorado.EDU> To: "Jeffrey T. Nelson" <jtnelson@mail.wsu.edu> Subject: Re: Uses of Web for ESL

MIME-Version: 1.0

Status: RO

X-Status:

On Fri, 14 Feb 1997, Jeffrey T. Nelson wrote:

>If you have created Web pages to help students learn English, have you done them for the purpose of 1) student self-access or 2) supervised access during class time?

Both. Check http://spot.colorado.edu/~youngerg/ei-stuff.html for the resource page I have put together for students at my institute. Students link to news sources, government databases, etc. in order to get information to support their written work and oral presentations. In addition, there are a few links to interactive activities, such as International Paper Inc.'s "The Challenge," a business simulation. See my answer below for more info about this site.

>Also, have you had students look at Web pages during a class meeting? How about as homework? Do you do group activities centered around Web pages?

Using "The Challenge" site, small groups in my listening/speaking class last semester worked together to formulate a business plan in response to the issues in put forth in that site. Another group activity I had students do in class was an election campaign game that's linked to my Politics page at http://spot.colorado.edu/~youngerg/poligov.html Actually, I need to do some link-weeding on that page; a lot of it had to do with the election last fall and I'm sure it has suffered some link-rot in the intervening period.

>These are important issues since the purpose of a page should help govern how it is evaluated.

That's true, and I know I have some serious thinking and re-organizing to do on the page I made... It's clearly the result of enthusiasm for the vastness of the resources mixed with severe limitations on my time for making it into something coherent, as I think may be the case with lots of websites teachers have put together.

Good luck on your thesis.

--Greg

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- + Greg Younger The Economics Institute +

+ youngerg@spot.colorado.edu Boulder, Colorado, USA +

+ http://spot.colorado.edu/~youngerg/ +

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 16:39:08 -0800 (PST) X-Authentication-Warning: thecity.sfsu.edu: Host localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol Reply-To: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

Originator: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

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Precedence: bulk

From: Heidi Shetzer <hshetzer@ix.netcom.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu> Subject: Re: Uses of Web for ESL

X-Comment: Frizzy University Network

Status: RO

X-Status:

Jeffrey T. Nelson wrote:

--snip--

>If you have created Web pages to help students learn English, have you done them for the purpose of 1) student self-access or 2) supervised access during class time?

Most of the pages I have created to use with my classes have been for organizational, logistical purposes.

For example, for a Spring 96 reading/writing class I taught in our lab once a week, I created a Class home page now located at: http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/resources/TESOL/Heidi/student.html

That page was used for different purposes depending on the sections of the page.

1) <<Spotlight>> changed each time before class. I'd have links there that I wanted students to check out during class. For example, we were reading different versions of Cinderella in our non-computer lab class and so in the lab we checked out some other versions on the Web and discussed the differences.

2) <<Student Links!>> has links to annotated bibliographies of Web pages my students thought were interesting. We first did an activity to learn how to do research on the Web with search engines and indices. Then students chose a site of interest to annotate which I then put on another Web page. 3) <<Search for Info on the Web>> has links to search engines. 4) <<English Learning Resources>> has links to other ESL related Web sites for publication of their writing, self-access materials, or readings on punctuation, how to write resumes, etc.

5) <<University Information>> has links to finding and applying to US universities.

6) <<Local UIUC Information>> has links to joining student organizations, and reading about the local community.

7) <<Other Links that might be of Interest>> has links to travel information and other miscellaneous resources.

The next course I taught was called English Language through Computers and the Internet. This was an integrated English skills class combined with learning about the Internet and reading and discussing Internet issues. We were in the computer lab for each class session and so the Web page model became more of a Web site. The main page at http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/ELCI/sec3/ served as a main menu to other pages for the course. The other pages included 1) Course Description 2) Agenda and Assignments--this changed each week. 3) Read and Respond--this links to online NY times articles we read in class, and to a cross-class forum for discussing the articles. 4) Members of the Class--group picture 5) ELCI Web Resources Page--for creating Web pages 6) Final Projects--Home Pages

So with those two examples it seems to me that the Web pages were mainly for organizational and instructional purposes.

>Also, have you had students look at Web pages during a class meeting? How about as homework? Do you do group activities centered around Web pages?

We'd use them during class. In some cases students could continue with them after class or find their assignment if they were absent.

We did pair and group activities with Web pages. For example, researching different travel destinations in pairs and presenting the findings in front of the class using the LCD panel as a presentation tool.

Heidi Shetzer

Dirt Road Media

University of New Orleans

hshetzer@ix.netcom.com

Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 19:06:48 -0800 (PST) X-Authentication-Warning: thecity.sfsu.edu: Host localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol Reply-To: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

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From: Ron Corio <rcorio@saturn.vcu.edu>

To: Multiple recipients of list <neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu> Subject: Re: Uses of Web for ESL

X-Comment: Frizzy University Network

Status: RO

X-Status:

Hello Jeff and Others,

I create a Web page for each of the classes I am teaching. In the writing classes, which meet in a computer lab or computer classroom, I ask students to go to the Web page as soon as they come into class and print a copy of the day's lesson plan. This is the only time most students look at the class page during a class meeting. The lesson plan includes announcements, the activities for the class period, including instructions if needed, and the homework assignment.

Each class page also contains links to all past lesson plans, a course description and syllabus, examples of the students' writing, including a self-introduction.

Handouts for using a class computer account, including WordPerfect for Unix, creating a Web page, using a MOO, and for assembling a portfolio are included. I use the Web pages to archive and deliver handouts to students. Thus when a student loses a handout or doesn't receive one because of an absence, she need only go to the class page and print a copy.

There is also a link to a page for the current interclass project. Also included are links to search engines, online reference books, and grammar help.

The class pages I create are used to communicate with students, archive and deliver handouts, post samples of student writing, and for self-help purposes.

..ron

---

Ron Corio USA/Virginia/Richmond/VCU

rcorio@vcu.edu http://www.vcu.edu/cspweb/ron.html

Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 21:21:13 +0000

From: Elaine Hoter <elaine@mofet.macam98.ac.il> Reply-To: elaine@mofet.macam98.ac.il

Organization: Talpiot College

MIME-Version: 1.0

To: jtnelson@mail.wsu.edu

Subject: web pages

Status: RO

X-Status:

Hi Jeff

My course is for class time access, it joins teacher trainees and students of from different parts of the world, teaches the Internet and how to use it for EFL, take a look and then I'll be only to pleased to answer specific questions.

http://www/macam98.ac.il/~elaine/eti/welcome.htm Regards

Elaine Hoter

Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 05:25:45 -0800 (PST)

X-Authentication-Warning: thecity.sfsu.edu: Host localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol

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Originator: neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu

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Precedence: bulk

From: Andreas Lund <andreasl@sn.no>

To: Multiple recipients of list <neteach-l@thecity.sfsu.edu>

Subject: Re: Uses of Web for ESL

X-Comment: Frizzy University Network

Status: RO

X-Status:

At 10:58 14.02.97 -0800, you wrote:

>If you have created Web pages to help students learn English, have you

>done them for the purpose of 1) student self-access

Yes: http://home.sn.no/~andreasl/

or 2) supervised access during class time?

Yes: There are some examples on http://skolenettet.nls.no/dok/sn/fagene.html

(this is a site for Norwegian teachers, but you will recognize the word

"engelsk" here as the key to the English activities.

>Also, have you had students look at Web pages during a class meeting? How

>about as homework? Do you do group activities centered around Web pages?

Yes. Recently we spent some time reviewing the Library of Congress Home

Page. The pupils commented on both form an content. We received replies from

both the Chief Librarian and the Project Manager of LoC, and they will even

send us a poster. The pupils were tickled pink!

We also have a project involving pupils in Italy, Portugal and Sweden, where

we make use of web pages to illustrate the theme: The ocean as a link

between North and South Europe. This is in the very beginning. (Much

material will be addded during spring). It's found at

http://home.sn.no/~andreasl/tipi/tipi.html

>These are important issues since the purpose of a page should help govern

>how it is evaluated.

Agree! Good luck!

Andreas Lund

***************************

Andreas Lund

andreasl@sn.no

http://www.sn.no/~andreasl/

***************************


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