WEBSITE EVALUATION: USINGENGLISH.COM

Welcome dear reader!

Today's post involves criticisms related to ELT (English Language Teaching) which is my department.  We have different ways to access information in 21. century and mostly benefit from the internet. There are many  websites to help us in English learning. As everyone can reach wrong results from every topic and even learning a wrong usage of a word can be lead it fossilization the accurancy of information is so important and especially while learning a language you individuals should be more careful . I have evaluated, criticized and search for an  ELT website UsingEnglish.com and I need to share something behind the scene with you about that site.

Richard Flynn is the editor and main content author and Adam King is the site administrator at UsingEnglish.com and there are some information about their other sites, profiles and proficiencies but not their educational career or world views. In this site  English test exam samples, articles, English references are shared  for EFL(English as Foreign Language) and ESL(English as Second Language)   students, teachers, learners and academics. As English is a world language the purpose of this site make it easier for everyone to learn it as second language. But the way site teaches   theoric and rote learning. The site has made an update on  PDF lesson plans section on March 22, 2011 and grouped  lesson plans into different categories as could be found more easily . Updating a site is quite effective in keeping up with the era but making it six years ago shows that it is not a successful website. If there are nineteen site contributors and four people for staff they should at least check the shortcomings of the site in every seven months . Although the informations are given on the site accurate, and there is  no error UsingEnglish.com sadly include broken links. While my deeply searching I clicked the PDF form of irregular verbs and it couldn't open. After seeing there are broken links more than one I wonder how many they are ? I used another website it is brokenlinkcheck.com and free to use . After processed 203 web pages of site and 670 links there are more than fifty broken links of site occurred. This is not show UsingEnglish.com  is bad website and shouldn't use for English learners but there is another big issue need to cover up that no one wants to click and couldn't open a file, page, article or document.

There are quite a few pictures  and videos which are given with links their quality is not high and I did not find relevant to the topic . The site only addresses reading and writing skills as there are almost no visual images. The access  to knowledge is comprehensive  and exhaustive. Colors are pale and font types are so small that it makes reading more boring and time consuming. Then I sent a mail and suggested that they should help not only linguistic  learners but also kinesthetic, visual learners and make changes for more engagement learning situation for especially young learners. Both teachers and students have separate parts for their own you can see from the picture below. Teachers who use the grammar translation method can easily use the tests and sample quizzes in the class. But learners may be lost and may not be able to reach the subject easily.