Description Agenda Website

There is a wide variety of Language Learning Websites (LLW henceforth) on the internet. All of them cater for learners of different ages, views of how a language should be learned and what is fashionable nowadays in the era of social networks. Among the wealth of sites found online, I decided to focus on Agenda Web (http://www.agendaweb.org/). Agenda Web can be considered like a big portal due to the number of other sub-websites (Alexander & Tate,1999) or links that it connects with. In fact at the bottom of the site readers can find the next inscription:  “Would you like to have a link to your exercises placed here?   SEND A MESSAGE”. Its homepage orients readers through a top-down and left-right reading path where they can find the following super-ordinate nodes (Martinec & Van Leeuwen, 2006): “verbs, vocabulary, grammar, reading, resources, videos, song, listening and learning”. These are shown as the main nodes of the website. However, the website is saturated with other types of textual objects such as ads, online dictionaries, and internal search boxes.  Depending on the link that users click, they may be taken to a page which looks similar to agenda website’s homepage. It will show lists of links to exercises related to what users intended to practice. For instance, if users click on a link about body parts, they will find lots of exercises about the topic. By clicking on one of those exercises, users are taken to a different websites that has one exercise about that specific topic. Basically, what Agenda web does is to gather together all exercises about one specific topic from all possible sub-websites that have agreed to be linked to it.

The website does not clearly establish what type of population it is created for. However, among the vast list of links users can find links such as: songs for kids, nursery rhymes etc. Additionally at the bottom of the website there is a  link that says “Exercises for Kids” which may indicate that the rest of the website is for older populations. Nevertheless, this is not necessarily true since once you start navigating through the different links the site offers, it is easy to find sub-websites that target children. On the other hand, the website is also addressed to teachers; again at the bottom of the page there is a row with the following links: “RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS > sites for teachers  educational websites   top edusites”

The language levels that the site provides exercises for are not established. Users need to click on any of the links of the activities where they would be taken to some pages that in occasions present other menus where users can choose their level. Thus categories such as: elementary, lower intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced lead users to exercises tailored to their level.  The only shortcoming is that these links determining the level do not work, therefore users must click any of the links that in most of the cases says: “exc” or “fla”, if they want to find exercises that match their language level. My guess is that “exc”, refers to exercise but I am not sure about what “fla” stands for.

Comments about the website

My commentary will concentrate on the type of website, its design and the type of language view that displays.  First of all, this is a very sui generis website.  It does not have clear goal due to the fact that there is nowhere on the site users can find clear information about the pedagogical purposes of the designers or owners of the site. Instead users find information about the owner of the site who writes a short text in Spanish making disclaimers about the website, all in legal and business terms. Based on Alexander & Tate (1999), the website presents another design issue, it lacks information about the intended audience. As I mentioned above this is not clear, user have to navigate the site in order to find the appropriate exercises that match their language level.  There are many other problems regarding the organization of the information and navigation. If we think of the super-ordinate objects that organize the information into big topics we deduce that there is not a clear organizational principle or criterion of the information. It shows categories such as:  verbs (word class), vocabulary, grammar, reading, listening (language skills and sub skills), videos, song (products) and resources and learning  (two words that are difficult to match or relate to the others). This indicates lack of curricular knowledge of the person who organizes language contents. In general the organization of  language content should follow the structure of any type of syllabus: structural, theme-based, task-based, content-based, functional etc. (Dubin & Olshtain, 1986).

Another drawback of the website is the lack of provision of a common thread of development for language learners. Users cannot expect to follow a coherent program or path of learning since each exercise they chose to do will take them to different sub-websites with different approaches and language levels and types of exercises. The website is only useful if learners use it for sporadic work on certain grammatical aspect, vocabulary or language skill: listening or reading. I have to say that within the wide variety of websites that can be found in Agenda Web, many offer excellent exercises, games and interactive ways to practice English. However, users must really dedicate time or be lucky to find at first glance some of these websites.

While some of the sub-websites that are linked to Agenda Web are highly multimodal,  many others feature the  linear models of the web 1.0. The problem with this website is that it cannot be analyzed as a regular website with various pages that constitute a whole, because its navigation path usually follows this sequence: Agenda Web mainpage^sub-wesite^sub-website’s page, or sometimes users can go to a page that belongs to Agenda Web site and from there they are linked to another external site. Yet, it is not clear when users can be taken to a page that still belongs to Agenda Web site or another external source. Also when users are taken to an external source it is the decision of the users whether they want to come back to Agenda Web or continue working on the sub-website they were taken to. In is structure, Agenda Web presents the traditional reading path of web 1.0, vertical and horizontal. Despite the fact there are links everywhere, the way the information is distributed, by columns, sets the path for users to go through the site.  But what can evidently depict this website’s affiliation to web 1.0 is the philosophy behind its design. First as expressed by Lankshear  & Knobel (2006, p. 17): “ The first generation of the Web  has much in common with an industrial approach to material productive activity. Companies and developers worked to produce artifacts for consumption”.  I think this website sees language learners as consumers, this explains why there seems to be the intention of avoiding any kind of relationship with the user from the part of the owner of the site. His discourse relies on the business and legal  sphere. For instance, the only way to contact the owner is by going to a link that is located in the lower-right corner of the page; it says: Privacy Policy. The idea of relation or distance with the user of the website has to do with one of the main differences between web 1.o and web 2.0. According to Schrage (cited in Lankshear  & Knobel, 2006), the principal impact that the web 2.0 has produced is the orientation toward relationships between people and institutions. By any means Agenda Web is promoting any kind of interaction; it is only working as an information provider.

Finally the website clearly aligns with the typical design of the generation of sites corresponding to the structural view of CALL (Levy & Stockwell, 2006; Fotos & Browne, 2004). The structural view of CALL clearly materialized the principles of structural linguistics that dominated the scene during the sixties and the seventies. The way the website organizes information and language items resembles the structural view of language. In most instances links are labeled by grammatical structures:  Present tense, passive; or vocabulary items: the body, clothes etc. This addresses learners who think that a language is a set of structures or at the same time it leads users to think that language should be thought of this way, since that is what the web site is all about. Thus, a website like this might excerpt influence in two ways, first it reinforces user’s views or imaginaries about what language is and second it helps build views about what language is. This aspect evokes what Dijk (1997) asserts that the structure and ways contents are presented in media like websites, shape people’s cognition.

In conclusion, the affordances of this websites materialized in its design allows us to see that in general the principles of construction and use of the site fit those ones of web 1.0. The linearity proposed as a reading path, the monomodal use of communication resources (in general the semiotic mode that predominates is written language in the home page) and the organization of information, in this case language items, resemble the view of language of structural CALL. Agenda Web, in the case of LLW constitutes a genre of websites that I have seen little. Although it presents the advantage of variety of activities, it fails to provide a sequential learning process to users of the site.

REFERENCES

Alexander, J. & Tate, M. (1999). Web wisdom. New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Dubin, F., & Olshtain, E. (1986). Course design: Developing programs and materials for language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fotos, S. & Browne, C. (2004). The development of CALL and current options. In S. Fotos & C. Browne (Eds), New perspectives on CALL for second language classrooms (pp. 3-15). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlboum Associates

Knobel, M. & Lankshear, C. Sampling “the New” in New Literacies. In M. Knobel & C. Lankshear (Eds.), A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29, pp. 1-24). New York: Peter Lang

Levy, M. & Stockwell, G. (2006). CALL dimensions. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Martinec, R. & Van Leeuwen, T.( 2009). The language of new media: theory and practice. UK: Routledge.

Van, Dijk. T.  (1997). Racismo y análisis crítico de los medios. Barcelona: Paidós.