User:FawnTail/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
English-language learner

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this entry because I work with English Learners and was curious about the information and references shared with readers. The entry begins with a warning box saying the article has multiple issues, including being written in the form of a personal reflection and is mainly focused on English Learners in the United States. The article limits the scope of the history of ELs to the United States and contains long quotes, in addition to several other issues listed below, so the entry has room for improvement.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section does not give a summary of the articles main sections and is overly wordy.

Content

The content material is out-of-date. EL students are no longer referred to as Limited English Proficient. The content is relevant to the topic, but is a bit disjointed or confusing at times. I'm not sure why the "taxpayer revolt" needs to be included in the article. The content does, however, address an historically underrepresented population. Under the Methods of Instruction section, I would add information about the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) and reference Echevarría et al. (2017).

Tone & Balance

Many of the sections are written with a neutral, facts only view. However, occasionally the article includes statements that do not have a reference and so read as opinions. For example, under the Teacher section, the author writes, "it is not uncommon for teachers have negative perceptions of ELL students in their classrooms" without providing a reference to research, so the passage reads as the author's opinion.

Sources & References

The section titled Scaffolding does not provide any references to document the facts presented. Additionally, reference #20 is from 1998 and perhaps outdated. A second reference is cited for the same fact, so perhaps reference #20 is no longer needed. Overall, the references are up-to-date and relevant. However, due to the limited scope of the article to ELL in the United States, the references do not include sources discussing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students who are learning English in countries where the dominant language is other than English.

Organization & Writing Quality

I found the article difficult to follow in places. For example, in the subheading about enriching the classroom, the paragraph begins by discussing the inclusion of culture, literature, and other disciplines into instruction, but I'm not sure what is meant by other disciplines? Are these content classes, such as math, science, and social studies? What classroom is the writer referring to? Are the students in a separate ELL classroom?

There are only a few grammatical errors and no spelling errors that I found.

A section on EFL students would broaden the scope of the article to include global, rather than just United States ELL students.

Images and Media

There are no images or media in this article.

Talk Page

The article is a c-class page, is supported by the Applied Linguistic Task Force, and was part of two Wiki Education Foundation course assignments. The talk page has an entry from 2014 that suggests utilizing one term for ELLs, instead of varying between acronyms. The entries vary between referring to ELLs as CDL, LED, and ELLs, and I agree that the article would flow more smoothly if only one acronym is used.

Overall Impressions

The article has much that could be improved, but I'm not sure who one would begin editing the subheads to create an entry which flows smoothly. Perhaps starting by standardizing the term used to refer to English language learners would be a helpful starting point. The article would benefit from broadening the information to include English learners outside of the United States.