evaluation of online writing platforms: a path to developing more efficient instructional/learning materials in efl context

Digital technology plays a crucial role in modern second/foreign language education. since there exists valuable information gathered and organized on the complex phenomenon of language acquisition, there are many synchronous/asynchronous websites available and designed to facilitate learning many languages, including english, and assist learners to achieve their goals. to get the best possible outcome from using these websites, they need to be evaluated, taking various factors into account. following this line of approach, the researchers made an attempt to carefully scrutinize a number of writing-related teaching/learning websites. to this end, aly’s (2008) evaluation checklist with 63 items and eight components/attributes (i.e., usefulness for tefl instructors and students as well as authority, purpose, coverage, objectivity, accuracy, and currency) was used to explore eight purposively selected well-known writing platforms. based on the close scrutiny and examination of the completed website checklists, the findings indicated that, despite the technical and technological superiority of some platforms over others, two platforms, out of the eight assessed websites, were extremely helpful for teaching and acquiring the foundational writing skills of esl and efl learners, and one received the lowest evaluation score, while the rest were moderate in rating with regard to the eight mentioned attributes. the analysis of the data revealed that among the evaluated websites, “paragraph punch” and “quill.org”, as two interactive writing platforms, achieved the highest average scores of 84% and 83% of the checklist items' ratings, respectively. the “online writing lab,” or “owl.purdue.edu,” had the lowest mean score of 68%. the study suggested some guidelines to decrease the potential ramifications and to standardize and boost the platforms’ positive aspects, which have some practical implications for online-educational content developers as well as educators, assisting them in creating better academic and user-friendly instructional/learning materials.