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!

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Reflection: definitions of CALL

I enjoyed reading both articles of the overview and various definitions of CALL. Egbert (2005) has nicely connected the definitions of CALL, TESOL standard, the guidelines of using technology, and the National Educational Technology Standards. The author also points out the the four key principles of CALL. The central argument of this book chapter is that the focus of CALL should be on language learning and not on technology. The effective and efficient use of technology then will facilitate both learning and teaching. Kern & Warschauer (2005) offer a good overview of the development of CALL. The authors review the shift in perspectives and theories and practices in CALL and the results of paradigm shift and their influences on the use of technology. The structural, cognitive/constructivist, and sociocultural perspectives all serve as significant frameworks for the use and development of technology in various stages of language learning. The authors also offer examples of different computer software and computer use to demonstrate the changing nature of technology in language learning and teaching.


I was particularly impressed by NBLT article by Kern & Warschauer(2005). I am familiar with the shifting perspectives in learning (structural, constructivist /cognitive and sociocultural) and it is very nice to learn more about how the field of CALL is also influenced by the paradigm shifts. However, after reading the articles I have a few questions and comments. First of all, just as Kern & Warschauer (2005) and Egbert point out, it is impossible to provide a definition which would cover the essential principles and most researchers would agree on. However, I was wondering that it might not be very productive in terms of teaching and researching since so many different abbreviations and terms are all used to refer to similar phenomenon in language education. In response to the Egbert article, although I appreciate his effort to connect the principles of CALL and various instructional standards, I feel some of the eight conditions of classroom language learning appear to be too general. For example, the definition of authentic tasks is still unclear. In addition, I don't think a learning task which learners may not use ourside of classroom or may not parallels real functions beyond the classroom is without value. After all, a language classroom is an environment created for maximum learning and not simple exposure to target languages. In general, I appreciated the point that all the authors make in the theory and practice of CALL which emphasizes communication and learning VIA technology. Technology is the facilitator in the language classroom and should not be the replacement of teachers. I also agree with the the sociocultural perspective of learning. A well-structured technology-mediated environment has much to offer since our students probably often feel more comfortable than teachers. The Time magazine article seems to be a good connection and bridge to our reading for this week. How we can create a true 21 century classroom so it will match our students' and even our very own lived experience can be quite a challenge.