Evaluation of the website: voanews.com

· Purpose

To help English learners to manage the English language in a more effective way.

· Skills the site builds

The main skills that this web site provides are the following: Reading and listening but remember that those skills work in pairs; so, at the same time it works with speaking and writing through the two mentioned before. It also promotes critical thinking since most of the topics employed in the activities are on the table.

· Objective:

· Audience: worldwide audiende of about 123 million people around the world.

· Target level: General public. There are activities for beginners, intermediate and advanced English learners.

· Sensory input: effectively.

· Feedback: semi-intelligent error feedback.

· Interactivity: lots.

· Content: 1hour.

· Appeareance: average. The site has functional look no major flaws appeareance.

· Navigation: easy. Very easy to find specific pages. Everything organized into categories.

· Load speed: fast.

· Brief description of the site:

The site studied is voanews.com; this website is a type of newspaper or magazine that presents its viewers a varied content that develops topics like culture, education and, of course, informative articles or news about events that happen around the globe. Voe or Voice of america, as it is called, includes different type of multimedia to make more effective the process of communication. So, we cannot only found texts but also videos. Besides, this website offers to its users a section specially created to help non-native speakers of English to learn or improve their English level. These activities consist on a written article, the audio of the same article and series of activities to help readers to understand the text better.

· What we like about the site:

Reading is a excellente way to know the conventions of a language. You can learn both vocabulary and grammar while reading a text and that is a process that your mind does unconciously; in this site reading is the main thing that can be practiced. But it is not only that, the thing is that the info you read there is reall; so, the process of acquisition becomes easier. At the same time, people can listen to the audio of the article while reading it what help them to know how the words they are reading are pronounced. The best thing is that once you have ended the reading or listening of the article you can go to the activities which really help you to fix the knowledge. Another possitive aspect of this site is that articles are organized into categories so you can easily find any of your preference. You can find here information about different topics; so, readers can go there not only to be entertained but also informed.

· What we don’t like about the site:

The home page is not that interesting. IF you are not interested in reading, you should probably close the page of go back before realizing that there are videos and listening activities on the page, but the first thing you can think about a common online newspaper. Another thing is that the kind and size of letters employed are not the best (in our oppinion) in the video section you can barely read the description of the video before seen it. In addition, once you go to the activities, you have to wait to do them because they take a lot time to be ready to do them.

Evaluation score for
Content usefulness: 6/6
Interface design: 3/4
My overall evaluation grade: 9/10