Web Evaluation #2 English for Everybody

I found an interesting website to evaluate for the web evaluation number 2 known as “English for Everybody” at http://www.english-online.org.uk/backindex.html. The intended purpose of English for Everybody is to help teach any willing student the English language through the use of instructional explanations, activities, multimedia, and quizzes. The content of this website is broken up into 8 different sections:

Multimedia English Courses – English Language courses – Learning resources and services –English for Special Purposes – English for Mobile Devices -  EFL exam practice – Ask the Prof.
Reading practice – English Language games

Each section contains different areas of focus or methodologies geared towards English language learning. The multimedia English courses section offers video tutorials along with a video transcription and accompanying exercises as well as a section on pronunciation that includes audio. The English language courses section offers 3 sections of courses divided by beginner, intermediate, and advanced and contain written lessons, vocabulary, and accompanying exercises and quizzes.  Learning resources and services section has a few links to related sites and English language newspapers. The English for Special Purposes section is further divided into sections of investing, marketing, the office, and computer. Each section offers vocabulary, grammar, and quizzes. English for mobile devices section offers links to the mobile version of English for Everybody with slightly less functionality. EFL exam practice is divided into several sections that describes the layout of a variety of language assessment tests such as TOEFL, IELTS, KET, etc. Ask the prof section is a forum offering users the ability to ask questions and interact with native speakers. The reading practice section offers links to authentic English texts and the English language games section links to a list of several games that help improve English and some just for fun.

The website includes a variety of external documents with links to authentic texts and pages devoted to explaining the layout and method of some of the interactive courses offered. The most interesting aspect of this site is the amount of content including, quizzes, multimedia videos, audio, interactive websites, games, tests, and vocabulary training. This site has so much content that it is difficult to say precisely what language goal would be successfully targeted using this website, but I think some basic grammar and vocabulary could be effectively learned and even though there is a section on pronunciation, I do not believe speaking and listening would be effectively learned using this site. Through the use of interactive quizzes, games, and tests English for Everybody does offer immediate feedback and assessment, but it is limited to programmed responses. I think the layout and structure of the website is easy to use, but it would benefit from an update in graphic design.

The strength of English for Everybody is in its large amount of content and pages offered freely to anyone with internet access. The information is helpful and maybe beneficial to intermediate and advanced users, but I think that some of the beginner courses were not scaffolded in a way to really benefit true beginners. I think more interactive activities and images would be helpful for beginners to start from scratch without having to constantly look up some of the more difficult vocabulary not defined in beginner examples. All in all it is a useful website with a lot of content and instruction in grammar, vocabulary, and usage.

Corpus linguistics

“We thus commit ourselves to teaching what is often untaught and may, indeed, be unteachable in terms of conventional language teaching methodology.”

This seems like a common theme in CALL research, the concept of going beyond conventional language teaching methodology. I think this is one of the bonuses of CALL in that it can make use of conventional and unconventional methods. Most conventions started off as unconventional, so I think CALL helps ease the process when necessary.

 In response to Johns (1991) and Richards & Rogers (2001) articles, I think that data-driven learning was a big step in language education and provides a rich resource of examples and usage of countless words and phrases.  It also serves to give concrete data to a subject that almost everyone has an opinion of, “[d]ata-driven learning aims to contextualize and demythologize language.  It is a result of technology and the ability to organize words and language features quickly and easily.”

The idea of teaching students to use the corpus databases and encourage learner autonomy is, as both articles suggested, very beneficial, especially for more advanced learners that are able to find and pick out collocations themselves. I think the internet has opened up huge and navigable corpora for many students to have immediate access to. Social networking is one aspect of web 2.0 that provides a rich, accessible, and easily navigable corpus of real-world language use. The interactive aspects available allow the student to interact with the author immediately, something that the authors of these articles probably did not foresee. This type of interaction can allow for further understanding of the usage and meaning behind the language in question. This is very helpful for motivated, high level students such as those described in the University of Birmingham, but I am interested to find ways in which lower level students can also benefit from these resources. Overall, I think corpus based learning can effectively build confidence for students, particularly in the skills of reading and writing.

I have never used any methods, as far as I was aware, that made explicit use of a lexical syllabus or the most used English words. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has, and how the experience was.

Summary and Response to Anderson's Article (2003)

        Terry Anderson’s purpose in writing this paper, "Getting the Mix Right Again: An Updated and Theoretical Rationale for Interaction," is to create a theoretical rationale as well as a guide for creating distance education courses with the aim of being effective for a variety of students and learning needs. Anderson believes that interaction is the key to mindfulness in learners, awareness of other perspectives, and essential to the creation of learning communities. Not all interactions have educational value. In education, interaction is typically constrained from the student's perspective to the relationships between student-student, student-teacher, student-content. Anderson (2003) states, “high levels of more than one of these three modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational experience, though these experiences may not be as cost or time effective as less interactive learning sequences.” Student-teacher interaction has the highest perceived value among students while teacher-teacher interaction is crucial to the university based research production and evaluation model. ”

  Because of the low levels of most interaction types, the lecture format is not the best effective or efficient. Traditional distance education programs using independent studies allow for high student-content interaction and audio-video conferencing encourages mostly mid to low level interaction while web-based coursed using text functions provide high interactions among students. Net-based learning communities utilizing synchronous and asynchronous are rich in interaction. With the goal of creating efficient, educationally effective, and cost effective programs, student-student and student-content interaction can act as a substitute for student-teacher interaction. Recently, student-content interaction may be the most effective and available for many students because, "[t]he cost and restrictions on value of content interaction is falling much faster than interaction involving the other two forms of interaction (Moore’s and Metcalfe’s Laws), and thus is expanding in all areas, putting a premium value and cost on human based interaction: student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-teacher” (Anderson, 2003, pg. 10). 

     I think that Anderson has suggested a viable theory that I believe has been proven in the real-world. This article predates most of the web 2.0 boom and just missed out on the types of e-learning that allows for quality student-student, student-content, and student-teacher interaction without the timing issues mentioned in the article. Web 2.0 allows for a hybrid of all the methods mentioned in the article, creating a best of both worlds scenario. Distance learning may still not be perfect, but traditional classrooms have never been perfect either. As far as creating an efficient and cost effective distance learning course, I believe this theory acts as a quality foundation for the advancements made after the publication of this article.