This document discusses using web design analysis as a learning tool in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. It explores how analyzing website design can cultivate higher-order thinking skills and motivate students to produce original content. The document outlines research on how web design analysis was conducted with EFL students and the challenges encountered, such as students relying on surface-level comprehension and translation software instead of deep analysis. It proposes that teaching metacognitive reading strategies and having students explain design decisions can help address these challenges.

1. Design Thinking in EFL Context:
Studying the Potential for Language
Teaching and Learning
Dr. Debopriyo Roy
CLR Technical Communication Laboratory
University of Aizu

2. Introduction
• This article is an exploratory
attempt to understand
whether and to what extent
web design analysis as a
higher order thinking process
could be integrated in a
content-based foreign
language classroom in a
country like Japan.
• Is web design analysis a
worthy exercise, benefiting
students by cultivating
substantial thinking skills and
helping to produce original
content?

3. Motivation for Online Writing
• The issue of using web pages for
teaching writing is raised in Tan et.al.
(1999).
• Trokeloshvili and Jost (1997)
concluded that public displaying of
student text on a student home page
highly motivates students to conduct
writing and publishing.
• Belisle (1996) argued that networked
collaboration like using e-mail and
sharing files help learners create,
analyze, and produce information and
ideas more easily and efficiently.

4. Motivation
• Website evaluations or usability
studies have dramatically evolved
over the last decade or so.
• They include conceptual
discussions on what should be
evaluated and how to do it
(Instone, 1997; Neilson, 2000).
• Web analysis has the potential to
be a beneficial exercise (Bunz,
2001; Spyridakis, 2000) and more
so in an EFL context.

5. Web Analysis in EFL Context
• It might not be easy to implement web
analysis practices in an EFL setting.
• Students with little English background
have a general tendency to produce
English text using translation software,
copying from other sources with minimal
or reasonable rephrasing (Yamada, 2003).
• A web design project in that sort of a
learning environment has the potential to
quickly turn into a mundane visual
presentation and artifact through
excessive and sometimes exclusive focus
on page templates, style guides, text-
graphic coordination, but with very little
original text production for the websites.

6. Typical Web Analysis Issues

7. Web Analysis Context
• During a website analysis exercise
students read the text and graphics in
the web page, besides exploration of
the layout and design, and comment
based on what they see and
understand.
• There is less possibility for the reader to
copy the text material directly from the
website under investigation, as is
possible during reading comprehension.
• During website design analysis, readers
are rarely ever asked to comment on
the textual content, but rather the
designer spends time on the design of
text, graphics, menu and the overall
screen design and navigation.

8. Research Focus
• The major research question for this study
relates to readers’ (students with computer
science majors in this EFL context) ability to
successfully explain design decisions by
studying specific websites of interest, in an
English language course.
• Further, the qualitative study as reported here,
attempts to understand if readers are more
comfortable with specific types of design
queries as opposed to others, and fare
consistently better or worse over time.
• This study attempts to understand the extent to
which EFL readers are able to comprehend
different aspects of web design, equipped with
summative background lectures provided (at
the beginning and middle of the semester) to
make design decisions.

9. Significance of the Study
• The website analysis assignment in an
EFL classroom is significant for various
reasons:
• 1. It allows for a comprehensive
understanding of the extent to which
readers could understand information
organization, design and layout.
• 2. It allows for an understanding of the
extent to which readers used meta-
cognitive assessment strategies, and
variety of thinking with questions that
are broad in nature.
• 3. This assignment will help explain the
extent to which readers, with their levels
of English language processing ability,
and assessment strategies are
comfortable answering certain questions
as opposed to others.

10. Elements of User Experience Model
• The research questions developed for user
analysis in this project are based on the
following broad guidelines.
• Provide content that is engaging, relevant
and appropriate to the audience (Spyridakis,
2000).
• Use all available resources to better
understand users’ requirements (Adkisson,
2002).
• Ensure that the website format meets user
expectations, especially related to
navigation, content and organization (Lynch
and Horton, 2002).
• If user performance is important, make
decisions about content, format, interaction,
and navigation before deciding on colors and
decorative graphics (Baca and Cassidy, 1999).
• Consider as many user interface issues as
possible during the design process
(Zimmerman et al., 2002).

11. Metacognitive Reading
• Students have various strategies to
make reading and comprehension
relatively more effective.
• Students in Japanese EFL contexts
have extensively adopted meta-
cognitive reading strategies like
skimming, scanning, reading
headlines, using dictionaries,
translation etc. in analyzing technical
texts and results have shown
superficial and often surface level
ability to comprehend, analyze and
write about a technical text (Roy,
2010), while similar results have been
observed in other EFL situations
(Maghsudi and Talebi, 2009).

12. Reading Strategy and Web Analysis
• Metacognitive reading strategies will
influence readers' ability to analyze
information organization, design and
layout, grouping, navigation, audience
analysis etc.
• Neilson (1997) has demonstrated that
the website analysis task is different from
any other reading task, because it
requires an analytical mindset, analysis
and resultant English text production in a
specific design context. Also, ability to
explain a design and layout might not
always incorporate reading and
comprehending the entire text in the
web page. Readers might get away with
merely understanding the headlines, the
menu items, the introductory sentence of
a paragraph etc. (Neilson’s Alert box,
1997).

13. Web analysis and Higher Order Thinking
• Krug (2000) points out that design needs
to be intuitive. However, in an EFL context
where language proficiency is limited,
unless writing exercises demand that
design decisions be explained, there is no
way an output (a superior web page
designed) in itself could explain whether
designers (students in EFL or other
context) have properly understood the
design decisions and broader implications.
• Van Hoosier-Care (1997) describes the
website assignment as a rhetorical
exercise in the technical communication
classroom. It is important for the reader
to understand the conceptual process of
designing a website, include the rationale
of the project, target audience, purpose of
the website etc (December and Ginsberg,
1995).