Learning English?
Try the Internet

The good news is there are a lot more quality sites than there were the last time learning post covered this subject two years ago. The bad news is that to take full advantage of many of them, you really should have a fast Internet connection, an area where Thailand hasn’t made a great deal of progress.

You shouldn’t let this discourage you, however. If you are patient, there is still an enormous amount of learning material that you can access and a significant portion of it is still free. Hopefully, this brief survey will save you some time in finding it.

But first, if you have any intention of printing out materials or using the multi-media features many sites offer, make sure your computer has the necessary software. Five programs you will almost certainly need at some point are the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html) Macromedia Flash player and Shockwave (http://www.macromedia.com) the realONE player (http://www.real.com) and Apple Quicktime (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download). All are free, but the non-free versions are sometimes more prominently displayed, so you may have to search a little.

There is one purchase you might want to consider. A good CD-ROM advanced learner’s dictionary can be a wise investment. Open an Oxford or Macmillan dictionary on your computer, for example, put the cursor over an unfamiliar word and the program will look up its meaning for you. It will pronounce it too if you want it to!

The British Council's comprehensive site, "Learn English", has something for everybody, including young children.

Several free web sites offer a wide-range of materials and activities, some covering all the basic skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. You can’t go wrong by starting with the “Learn English” site sponsored by the British Council (http://www.learnenglish.org.uk).

This site is designed with the independent learner in mind from the high beginner to the upper intermediate. When you enter the site for the first time, click on “what is Learn English” for a quick orientation. Then look at what is available in each of the three main sections – Learn English for everyone, Learn English for children, and Learn English zones. And don’t miss the archives. There, you will find enough to keep you going for months, if not years.

The readings on the site are linked to the Cambridge online dictionary; so if you see a word you don’t know, just double-click on it. Keep the dictionary open and it will be almost instantly accessible for the next word.

For more advanced English, be sure to visit the BBC website. One portion of the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml) is devoted to English language learning. It is truly excellent. While you are there, be sure to try out the “words in the news” section. There, you will hear a recent and beautifully read BBC news story followed by explanations of key vocabulary.

You might think a one-man show would have difficulty competing with the likes of the British Council and the BBC, but then you don’t know Dave Sperling. He is the owner/operator of Dave’s ESL Café (http://www.eslcafe.com), one of the oldest and most popular education-based sites on the Internet. The learning post has actual proof of its popularity. We still get more than 1000 referrals monthly from his site to view the feature on Sperling that we published way back in February 2002 (http://bangkokpost.net/education/site2002/cvfb1202.htm).

While the site does offer the learner a wide variety of activities, its strength is in its interactivity. Here, the café metaphor is particular apt. Sperling, in fact, describes his site as “the Internet’s meeting place for ESL/EFL students and teachers from around the world!”

If you are able to overcome some initial shyness, it is a great place to communicate. Start with the forums which, according to Sperling, now have over 7,000 registered users. There are 21 themes ranging from cinema to the TEOFL. Many of those who post are obviously relatively new to the English language.

Sperling takes particular pride in his ‘chat central’. “This is an amazing community,” he told the learning post recently by email. “In my humble opinion, it is one of the friendliest and most accommodating chat rooms on the Internet. I popped in yesterday for a visit and met users from Thailand, Canada, Japan, the US, China, Spain, and the Czech Republic. It’s a really good mixture of both students and teachers, and I’ve also seen entire ESL classes chatting away.”

The British Council does not have exclusive title to “Learn English” as the name of a website. That is also the title EFL teacher Lynne Hand adopted for her site in 1999 (http://www.learnenglish.de). Hand has something for everyone and it is well worth more than one visit.

There are hundreds of web sites with more specialised aims. Our own learning post site http://www.bangkokpost.com/education) is a good example. It is aimed largely at helping readers acquire the English and develop the reading skills necessary for reading the Bangkok Post.

To get an overview of just how much is available on the web, check the links pages on the websites already mentioned. Also be sure to visits the massive links section accumulated by Charles Kelly and friends at the Internet TESL Journal (http://iteslj.org/links). While you’re at it, check the homepage as well (http://iteslj.org).

For a more focused list, try Joe Lauer’s “Best Internet Sites for Learning English” (http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/flare/EnglishStudySite2004.html). Michael Krause has also done a brilliant job of winnowing down the specialty sites to the 225 best with his ESL Independent Study Lab (http://www.lclark.edu/~krause/toppicks /toppicks.html). If you can’t find something there at your particular level of language, something is wrong.

Take pronunciation for example. Krause has multiple links to sites focusing on both British and American English, so you can take your choice as to which accent you want to develop.

Richard William's guide to reading resources on the web (inset) can lead you to enjoyable stories like "The cannon" pictured here.

Krause’s study lab is also where I found the link to Richard William’s wonderful guide to reading resources on the web (http://www.geocities.com/ccsnstudents/read.html). He has collected over 50 top-notch links to beginning, intermediate and advanced reading sites. While you’re at it, check out his homepage for suggestions on other skills as well (http://www.geocities.com/ccsnstudents).

If it’s listening practice you want, go immediately to Randall’s Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com). There you will find dozens and dozens of listening passages, exercises and quizzes at three levels of difficulty. The passages are all recorded with slow Internet connections in mind, so don’t be put off if you have a simple dialup connection.

The purpose of the site is to help students improve their overall listening comprehension skills, proprietor Randall Davis told the learning post via email. “How you approach the listening tasks is key,” he says. “I encourage students to first read over the pre-listening exercise to prepare them mentally to receive ‘the message.’ Then, students should read over the questions and distracters in the quiz to give them ideas on the topics of the conversation.”

There is also a post-listening exercise to give students practice in talking about the subject and using the vocabulary. “I designed the site to go beyond developing passive listening skills to more active, productive speech,” Davis explains.
One site with a great deal of potential belongs to the California Distance Learning Project (http://www.cdlponline.org). The site is aimed at adult learners and it features news stories divided into eleven different categories from family to nature. At the very least, each lesson contains a simplified version of a news story that has appeared on a Sacramento television station. There is a transcript with audio, followed by activities. Some lessons also contain the full version of the story plus a video of the actual television broadcast.

If you have a reasonably fast connection, be sure to visit the Virtual University Project run by Hiroshima University in Japan (http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~teaman/vu/index-e.html). There you will find video interviews with students of many different nationalities, all fluent English speakers. There are transcripts and activities to help you. The language is natural, but the questions are very easy so it is not difficult to follow, even for intermediate students.

Grammar has long been a staple of language learning sites. One reason for their popularity is that they offer instant gratification – multiple choice and fill-in-the blank exercise that can be immediately checked by the computer. Another obvious reason is that grammar usually figures prominently in standardised tests like the TOEFL and university entrance exams.

If you feel you need that sort of thing, you might start with the ESL’s Partyland quiz centre (http://www.eslpartyland.com/quiz%20center/quiz.htm). Another well-stocked source is the Internet TESL Journal’s self-study grammar quizzes (http://a4esl.org/q/h/grammar.html).

If you want an idea of just how strong (or weak) your English is, try a full scale assessment test from Churchill House of the UK (http://www.churchillhouse.com/tests/index.html). One and two-hour tests are available at four levels.

Building an effective vocabulary is a long-term project and here the “word-of-the-day” sites can be a big help – like the one we offer on our own learning post site (http://www.bangkokpost.net/education/worday/today.htm).

A bit more sophisticated is the word of the day from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/wordofday). It’s for native speakers of English, but the words are not as obscure as they tend to be on many other such sites. If that site is too difficult, try the Superkids site which features words for middle school students (http://www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/words/middle).

As a language learner, your goal should be to graduate to websites where English is used for normal communication. This is authentic English – the language intended for fluent users of English, not learners of English. The sooner you are able to try this, the better.

This can be a big step and it is probably best to ease into it. One site designed for this is the Special English section of the Voice of America (http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish). As the name implies, it’s not quite the real thing – the language is simplified and spoken quite slowly – but it does cover current events, including the latest news.

For authentic radio English, go the news section of VOA (http://www.voanews.com). Click on the main story and you will see the full text. To hear the broadcast, you have a choice of streaming audio (quickly hearing the story without saving it) or downloading the story onto your computer. That way you can listen to it as many times as you want. Notice there are many more stories you can read, hear and save as well.

News broadcasts are a good place to start, but they are not totally authentic in the sense that they are read from a prepared script. Here’s where radio or even TV interviews can provide a good option. If you are a cable subscriber and you have a video recorder, the CNN talk show Larry King Live is a good choice.

Tape a program and wait about two days. Then visit the CNN website (http://www.cnn.com). If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see a link to transcripts (http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS). Click on it and look for the date of the show you taped. Click on that, find the Larry King show and, presto, you have a great language lesson.

For authentic reading materials, try a magazine. You can find an excellent list on the yahoo site (http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Magazines).

Reading authentic materials online like the National Geographic Magazine is much less of a chore if you have a dictionary installed in your computer like the Oxford Genie pictured above. Touch a word in the text with your cursor and it will look it up for you.

For example under general interest, a good magazine to try is the National Geographic (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm). You won’t find whole stories, but you will find more than enough for reading practice. Here is where a CD-ROM dictionary is particularly useful.

Finally, you try something completely different. Visit the listening booth at the website of the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/booth/booth.cfm). There you can hear dozens of world famous poets reading their own poetry, often before a live audience. Click on the poem to see the text and click on the speaker symbol to hear the poem. Each poem takes a while to download, but is worth the wait.

Enjoy your holidays.