website evaluation: ESL MONKEY

Website title: ESL MONKEY.COM
Website URL: http://www.eslmonkeys.com/index.html
Grade/age level: multi-age
Language & content:

The website provides resources for teachers, schools and students. I think it intends to work as the information center for teachers who want to find ESL jobs, for schools which want to recruit ESL teachers, and for students who wan to find ESL schools. Advertisement is perhaps it's major concern! However, for this evaluation assignment, I will only focus on the students' learning resocurce part of the web site.

On the home page, it is devided into three parts with separate titles for its three different audience. It's first choice is for students to find ESL schools (schools are welcome to join and advertise their schools and programs on this web site) and the second link for students is then the learning resources. The main content includes small tools, big tools and interactive tools with links to every small, big and interactive tools pages. There are no external documents or guides for this website but becasue it's fairly easy to navigate so users can just play with it and figure out the contents and different links. In addition, there isn't much information on this website , so external document is not much needed.

I can see the wensite can be interesting to students because it offers lots of FREE stuff and the word free is everywhere. This definitely attract people who are interested in having more resources (reading materials, books, etc.) Also, are are a variety of activities such as word, slam/idiom and quote of the day, grammar focus, reading room and free English lessons which would appeal to learners. These choices are necessarily the most interesting and creative ones but they are the activities learners are comfortable with and interested in.

I think the activities on the website offere extensive reading and thus this can achieve the goal of previding language input and extensive reading for building vaocabulary. However, this website doesn't offer practice and there's also very little instruction. There are some guiding question for the activities in the reading room and in the reading activities of news articles and short stories. Other than guiding questions in the beginning of the activities, there isn't much teaching present. At most, I think they only provide information. In terms of feedback and assessment, there isn't any available on the website.

Perhaps although this is such a small website with very limited resources, it looks very organized and the pages are filled with words and informations. I realized some of the information is very repetitive after I played with it for 10 minutes. At the first look, the website does look colorful, organized, and somewhat attractive. I think the layout could be considered as one of the strengths of this website (just delussion?) Also, it is vey easy to navigate on this website, nothing complicated. A second strength of the website is that it offers internaitonal learning materia. I noticed that they include international newspaper articles such as articles from Bangkok Post, which is a relative usual choice of authentic material. However, I really appreciate their effort to include international reading texts becasue I believe students then will not just think they can only learn from reading articles from North American or British media.

However, there is also room for improvement. For example, most of the material is pretty outdated. I noticed some of the newspaper articles are from the year 2004. Also, some of the links no longer work. For example, the idiom of the day page doesn't have any information anymore and is still not removed from the website. Lastly, I found the website from goole. Although the website isn't very updated, it is STILL ranked as the first five websites on google when I typed in language learning website!