Summary of presentation - Ohio ESL (by Joyce, Sherlock and Jenny)

Introduction

Our group evaluates an English learning website Ohio ESL http://www.ohiou.edu/esl/english in which English learners can find lots of resources. Our focus will be on the Reading activities of this website in terms of operational description, teacher fit and learner fit. Last but not least, four problems are addressed and solutions are suggested. As our target learners are upper primary and junior secondary students, we choose the Beginner level of the Reading activities.

Operational description
Ohio ESL provides theme-based materials for users. The topic we have chosen is about Halloween. In fact, festival is one of the themes which is included in our curriculum, so we believed that it will be practical to have some understanding on how to deal with it.

The activities we can find in the website are a reading comprehension with 5 multiple choice questions, 25 gap-fill questions, 3 jumbled sentences and 5 matching questions. The layout of the first page is divided into 4 quarters with a timer, the text, instructions and MC questions. These items are almost in black and white in order not to distract learners by other attractive elements. However, some colourful symbolic icons are included as a kind of hint to learners if they do not understand what Halloween is, as these symbols are jack-o-lanterns. Once the user clicked the text, the timer will start counting 10 minutes for reading the text and answering those MC questions.

As Ohio ESL is one of the menu-driven programs, so users can choose what to do after reading the passage, there is no particular sequence, they can move around freely in choosing what follow-up exercise they want to do. Thus, not just the program and the teacher, but the learner also has the control over the use of the software.

In terms of input judging, this website is quite user friendly, as users are just required to click the right option in the MC questions, jumbled sentences and matching exercises. And, for the gap-fill exercise, users need to key in the answers one by one and they can make use of the words given at the bottom of the page.

In the field of feedback, the reading comprehension provides users implicit feedback which is to eliminate the choices left for the users so as to drive them to the correct answer. But for the gap-fill, jumbled sentences and matching exercises, the website uses explicit feedback to respond to the users’ choices. As stated, the reading comprehension provides implicit feedback to users, so the help options are useful in this area. Once a wrong option has been chosen, the website will hint the users indirectly so as to further their understanding to both the passage and the questions.

Teacher fit
For the Beginner level, teachers will be the ones who teach upper primary and junior secondary. Our group chooses this reading activity as the text length is optimum, of about 200 words in total and the reading text is neither too difficult nor easy for the students. The practices are meaningful, contextualized in a coherent discourse. It provides the users with hints and explanations for incorrect answers (Reading comprehension). It also allows the users to anticipate incorrect answers (Reading comprehension—hints for wrong answers and matching—symbols for right and wrong answers respectively).

Learner fit
As what we have mentioned, the target learners are upper primary and junior secondary students. We choose this group because of their English language proficiency level. Students can manage to do the reading activity of their level without great difficulties. The topic Halloween fits students’ needs and interests as they have learnt about festivals according to the syllabus in the curriculum.

For the learning style, it is active in the sense that students can do the reading activity independently either in school or at home. It is preferred to bring the whole class to the MMLC for a better classroom management. This program is mainly focus on discourse/text and the learner focus is reading. As the language use in the text is simple without difficult sentence structures and tenses, the language difficulty is less varied, transparent with familiar topic and suitable text length. Besides, the program is easy to operate as it provides simple instructions and user-friendly icons. The content of the reading activity is related to the syllabus in ordinary language and students have prior knowledge over the topic (festival).

Evaluation
There are four problems we can address in this program.

First, the learner focus is only on one skill (reading). We suggest students can do some extended tasks after the reading activity such as group discussion, group writing and presentation on different festivals. Next, there may be some problems in the scoring system where teachers do not know how well the students are doing. If possible, we think that score recording system should be added in the program. For the gap-fill exercise, the given words are placed at the bottom of the exercise. To be more user-friendly, the words should be put on top of the exercise. Besides, alternative answers may also be accepted. Lastly, students may encounter new vocabulary which may affect their understanding of the text. Link to picture dictionary or dictionary can be provided as reference.

Review
This website is quite simple and user friendly, maybe it is useful if we want to have a revision with students over simple present and simple past tenses together with the theme of festival. This website can serve as a pre-task to students in order to give them a global view over others' cultures and how others celebrate their festival. In such case, students can tell some norms of any Chinese festival and express their views in simple present tense as we are talking about the habits. Then teachers may ask them to recall a recent festival they have just come across with to use simple past tense to state what happened or sharing their own experience towards the festival. Another way to use this theme-based website is as a model essay to writing exercises teachers will give to consolidate and better understanding of students over the issue.