User:Naro13/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

https://w.wiki/9A73

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.)

Since I am currently a bilingual education teacher this article addresses a topic of interest of mine. Each day bilingual education becomes more and more important in the United States considering the influx of immigrants that are English language learners. My initial impression of the article was that it was informative to its own extent learning about the potential issues faced by ELLs. I thought this was interesting to read since some of these issues I've seen in my classroom.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Upon opening the article I noticed that it got straight to the point. The article I selected was “English-language learner” and starting with the first sentence it went into defining what an ELL was. Although it had an interesting hook that trapped the reader and got a definition out of the way, I thought the lead section was lacking information that was going to tell the reader more about what they will encounter. A big chunk of this section was spent defining various of the other terms that ELL’s have once been called or terms that have been used interchangeably. I personally found that for a reader this was almost like “filler” information and could be confusing considering these other terms such as CLD, EAL, or LEP, etc. were not brought up again throughout the article. Overall though, the lead section was concise and provided a short overview of what would be addressed later in the article.

Much of the content presented was relevant to the content. The article started off with a brief overview of the history of how the term ELL was adopted. The article also included the titles that were passed which allowed for bilingual education in schools. As I read the “History” section I felt like the information was very straightforward and did not allow much room for confusion which is something important to consider when choosing an article to gain information from. Much of the information appeared to be up to date but the majority of the article was written in a generic way where much of the strategies presented were those that teachers can use on their students. While reading one thing that did stand out to me was the “Instructional practices” section. This section starts off with saying that there was a study conducted by J. Huang which showed the impact classroom instruction had on the learning of ELL students. I found this section to be missing information since it did not tell the reader who J. Huang was, who the participants of the study were or where it was done. This could have a deeper analysis considering that the writer wants us to consider J. Huang’s research as supporting evidence for instructional practices that teachers should be using in the classroom. There was another instance where in the “Culture” section of the article a study was once again mentioned. The lack of explanation on the study and its targeted population does not make the study credible for the reader. Although references are present, in order to improve this article I would include explanations about the studies being done to let the reader know how the research found in the studies correlates with the information present in the article.

The article as a whole was written in a way that I almost considered to be contradictory to the research being presented. An evident example of this is presented in the section where pull out programs are being explained. Towards the end of that section the author uses the word “unfortunately” thus indicating that despite stating the information they know about the problem they think that it can be isolating for ELL students. I would also categorize this as opinionated writing rather than neutral due to the word selection of “unfortunately.” Another thing I noticed was that this article was mainly geared toward teachers and what they can do in the classroom. When referring to teachers though, the article often mentioned the words “some teachers.”  This is a very broad statement because as a reader you do not know who “some” teachers are. Something else that struck me while reading was when it was mentioned that educators need to be more involved in supporting students outside of the classroom as well. In terms of balance, this demonstrates that there is a heavier weight and responsibility being thrown on the teacher both inside and outside of the classroom. However, the article does not consider students’ at home life nor their parent involvement.

When looking through the articles sources I found that many of them appeared to be outdated. A couple of the sources are from peer reviewed articles from universities like Columbia and Harvard but the most recent source was from 2017. Much of which could have changed throughout the past 7 years in the education system and bilingual education. One of the sources did stand out to me since it was from a school district in California. The article does mention that in the Bay Area all-inclusive schools were beginning to open but the source only mentions the example of one school rather than multiple instances. In order to better support this claim with evidence I would suggest finding an article which talks about multiple districts opening all inclusive schools rather than just sticking to one district. Another one of the sources presented in the article references a blog. These are not considered reliable sources since they can contain very opinionated writing. The writer had referenced information from this blog when addressing the section that talks about the “use of native language.”  One source I was interested in looking into more was the one containing information about WIDA. To my surprise after clicking the link I found that the page was not found anymore therefore the information for the reference is not present which also affects the validity of the information presented in the article. This source also happened to be one of the most recent ones which should have presented information from 2017. That also goes to show that much could have changed between 2017 and present day. One source I did find to be very informative and helpful was the one from “colorincolorado.”  This is a site I had heard of multiple times before which provides many resources for ELL educators as well as parents. When going through the link I also thought it was helpful how there were links to other articles embedded as well as a video interviewing a migrant legal action program leader. Overall, many of the sources could be updated with more present day information in order to ensure its credibility.

As a whole I felt like the article was written very clearly. Everything was straight to the point and concise allowing a reader to understand the overall point of each section. At the beginning of the article there did seem to be some filler when addressing all the different terms used for ELLs but that was never brought up again. The few images presented did match the main idea of what they were supposed to be presenting but they were outdated. I found that the technology image was quite old considering that many students do not use desktops anymore and in the classrooms there are now other resources such as Smartboards or iPads. For the article to have been more professional I think different word choices should have been used. For example instead of saying “some teachers” or “some researchers” the writer could have been more specific since the term “some” is very vague.

Overall the article was short and straight to the point. Improvements would include addressing areas of vagueness like with the word “some.”  Explaining the studies that have been done and how the research from these studies help correlate to the overall point of the article. I noticed that the information was also mainly geared towards the United States and the American education system but there was not a lot of information from multiple states within the country. Another improvement would be updating the sources and steering away from blogs since they could easily provide opinionated information and writing. The talk page of the article also addressed some of the concerns I had such as the use of “some” and how it could be a generalizing word. As a whole though, the article was simple to read and got its point across despite some of the bumps in between.