Site Evaluation Guidelines
I.
Make your site easy, friendly and fun to use. (10pts)
The most popular pages should be the easiest to find.
II. Make your site useful. (10pts)
Provide Content targeting your students. Make sure your site is focused.
III. Maintain Integrity. Be Professional. (10pts)
Be accurate. Check your facts and spelling. If you have a collection of links,
be sure your description is accurate. In an obvious location, put the date of the last update and a way to contact you.
IV Linguistic Guidelines
4. Make key linguistic characteristics salient. (10pts)
Learners should be consciously aware of what they are learning and how they will use it. For example, introducing to learners that they will be learning the past tense and can use it to describe events that are completed makes learners aware/notice/focus more directly on the past tense as oppose to other things that may arise, like articles, resulting in more effective acquisition (Dougherty, 1991). This is approach increases noticing and hence learning according to the noticing hypothesis which states that people are more likely to learn if they notice the characteristics of what they are meant to learn.
5. Offering modifications of Linguistic input. (10pts)
Learners need help to understand new knowledge before acquiring it. Such help could include simplifications, explanations, and repetitive examples.
6. Providing opportunities for “comprehensible output”. (10pts)
Learners can learn if their output is comprehensible only if they have a chance to produce it. As such, learners must be given a chance/prompted for output that will judged as appropriate or not. Only then can learners’ progress.
7. Providing opportunities for learners to notice errors. (10pts)
Provide learners with tools to self check their answers before they submit them. This is an opportunity to notice and learn before submitting the work for correction by the teacher. One can provide links to dictionaries or additional examples and explanations.
Or, one could provide hints with the question before submission. For example, a student might be asked to submit a present simple sentence using:
She/run/quickly.
Before submitting an answer a hint could be given that He/She/It are conjugated differently than I/We/They.
8. Providing learners with opportunities to correct linguistic output. (10pts)
After submission and correction, to enhance learning, students could be given the questions they got wrong and do them again for additional points, further emphasizing noticing and error correction.
9. Supporting modified interaction between the learner and the computer. (10pts)
This could achieved via quizzes, asking a learner to investigate links and then answer questions or submit summaries, or by a learner being asked to progress only after a certain task has been completed. Another way may be via ESL web quests, an example can be found at :
http://members.tripod.com/teachnu2/farm_kids.html
10. Acting as a participant in L2 tasks. (10pts)
Completing a task using target language makes learning both meaningful (Ausubel, 1963), and can be interactional resulting in negotiation of meaning (Long, 1996) further enhancing language acquisition. For example, to encourage acquisition of travel related language, students might be required to plan a two week trip to Australia. This might include booking a flight, booking hotels in three destinations that must be visited, renting a car, making sure all passport information is valid, applying for appropriate visas – if necessary, and so on. This approach could be adapted using almost any target language as in the web quest above or using a little imagination
Total: /100
The most popular pages should be the easiest to find.
II. Make your site useful. (10pts)
Provide Content targeting your students. Make sure your site is focused.
III. Maintain Integrity. Be Professional. (10pts)
Be accurate. Check your facts and spelling. If you have a collection of links,
be sure your description is accurate. In an obvious location, put the date of the last update and a way to contact you.
IV Linguistic Guidelines
4. Make key linguistic characteristics salient. (10pts)
Learners should be consciously aware of what they are learning and how they will use it. For example, introducing to learners that they will be learning the past tense and can use it to describe events that are completed makes learners aware/notice/focus more directly on the past tense as oppose to other things that may arise, like articles, resulting in more effective acquisition (Dougherty, 1991). This is approach increases noticing and hence learning according to the noticing hypothesis which states that people are more likely to learn if they notice the characteristics of what they are meant to learn.
5. Offering modifications of Linguistic input. (10pts)
Learners need help to understand new knowledge before acquiring it. Such help could include simplifications, explanations, and repetitive examples.
6. Providing opportunities for “comprehensible output”. (10pts)
Learners can learn if their output is comprehensible only if they have a chance to produce it. As such, learners must be given a chance/prompted for output that will judged as appropriate or not. Only then can learners’ progress.
7. Providing opportunities for learners to notice errors. (10pts)
Provide learners with tools to self check their answers before they submit them. This is an opportunity to notice and learn before submitting the work for correction by the teacher. One can provide links to dictionaries or additional examples and explanations.
Or, one could provide hints with the question before submission. For example, a student might be asked to submit a present simple sentence using:
She/run/quickly.
Before submitting an answer a hint could be given that He/She/It are conjugated differently than I/We/They.
8. Providing learners with opportunities to correct linguistic output. (10pts)
After submission and correction, to enhance learning, students could be given the questions they got wrong and do them again for additional points, further emphasizing noticing and error correction.
9. Supporting modified interaction between the learner and the computer. (10pts)
This could achieved via quizzes, asking a learner to investigate links and then answer questions or submit summaries, or by a learner being asked to progress only after a certain task has been completed. Another way may be via ESL web quests, an example can be found at :
http://members.tripod.com/teachnu2/farm_kids.html
10. Acting as a participant in L2 tasks. (10pts)
Completing a task using target language makes learning both meaningful (Ausubel, 1963), and can be interactional resulting in negotiation of meaning (Long, 1996) further enhancing language acquisition. For example, to encourage acquisition of travel related language, students might be required to plan a two week trip to Australia. This might include booking a flight, booking hotels in three destinations that must be visited, renting a car, making sure all passport information is valid, applying for appropriate visas – if necessary, and so on. This approach could be adapted using almost any target language as in the web quest above or using a little imagination
Total: /100