A review of Scott Thornbury's A-Z blog

Scott Thornbury's A-Z blog https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/ provides a wealth of information on a range of ELT topics for interested readers of the field. As the title suggests, the blog is literally a one-stop forum covering nearly 200 concepts, all synchronized in an alphabetical order.

Scott Thornbury's A-Z blog homepage

User-friendliness

Useful website links

The blog is user-friendly particularly because of its unique dictionary-like index. Although the list can be tedious and overwhelming sometimes, a quick glance at it gives a clear idea of what topics the blog mainly covers. Readers can also open-up several browser pages of different topics at the same time using the hyperlinks. In addition, readers have been provided with a host of useful links at the right side section named 'Common Handy Websites'. This can be a very useful quadrant for practitioners who are interested in getting a detailed understanding of some areas of professional development (i.e. CPD online course sites).

Content

What is also unique about this blog is the idea of starting off every topic with interesting and catchy taglines e.g. A is for Accent, C is for CLT. It not only conforms to its user-friendliness but allows readers to navigate through many other common areas of ELT that they may like to have a look at. Detailed reference list found below each content can be equally helpful for readers interested in further reading. The blogger has been successful in building a sound relationship with readers with his content presentation style. It doesn't only highlight salient aspects of the given topic but touches upon a number of authentic sides that could in on way or the other, be relevant to readers' overall understanding. For instance, while I was skimming through the concept of autonomy on the blog, I realized how the blogger skillfully connected his personal experiences of say, attending conferences, writing chapters or even observing classrooms with the topic. However, some lengthy references have made the topics somewhat condensed with information which many readers may find hard to process all at the same time.

Layout

Compared to its rich content, the layout of the blog appears to be very basic. The font size is relatively smaller which can create difficulty if readers spend a long time reading the blog. On the right side of the blog, some adverts of Thornbury's books are displayed for readers to view and purchase. Presumably, the blogger may have received huge responses from enthusiastic readers through this section! Moreover, the blog displays other usual features such as search box, archive section and labels. From reader's viewpoint, the label section seems very attractive because of its variation in font size and design. It was equally fascinating to skim through some of the recent comments on discrete concepts. Readers can conveniently explore this section as it also contains hyperlinks.  However, I noticed there isn't any point of providing a separate section named 'index' when the homepage itself displays the index. This feature of the blog can make readers confused in the first place. 

Overall, a flurry of comments proves that the blog is visited by a good number of viewers. However, I doubt whether the blogger regularly updates his page because if revised, many of the topics that were raised by readers would have appeared in the index. Lastly, although the blogger claims it to be a sort of dictionary of issues related to ELT and SLA, many other key and state-of-the-art notions of this field are yet to be expounded.