Hello my fellow friends!
How have you been? I’ve been busy all this week but that’s how a student’s life is, right? I couldn’t even get a chance to sit in front of my laptop and check on my blog. All I could do -when I had the chance- was visiting certain websites and just spend a few minutes there before I doze off.
We all have a few websites we visit on a daily basis. But as an ELT teachers and learners, how many of us have an ELT website that we cannot stop using? Or why do we need them and how useful are they? In this post I want to share an ELT website and my evaluation on it.
Websites -either authentic or created for English learning and teaching purposes- are part of our teaching in the classrooms. There’re thousands of ELT websites all over the Internet for students and teachers to benefit. One of these websites that I have found is EnglishClub.
EnglishClub is a website dedicated to English language learners and English language teachers by offering various activities, games, tests etc. for learners and lesson plans, worksheets, articles etc. for teachers. The website is part of TEFL and EasyEnglish and founded by Joe Essberger.
The Purpose
EC is a free website designed to help students learn English online. It allows students to;
- make their own English page with blogs, photos, videos, music, groups and friends
- test their level in English and get help with English grammar
- study English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation
- play English games and do English quizzes online
- chat in English with other students and teachers
- find schools where they can learn English at home or abroad
- find penpals for English practice
The Site and the Author
Joe Essberger is the author of the site which was found in 1997 and is the contributor almost all activities on the website as well as the others. He is an English native speaker and an English teacher. As far as I could observe he is still active and writes post on the blog and forums regularly.
The Content
As I mentioned above, the content of the website is extremely rich. From listening activities to games and more, you can find what is suitable for yourself. If you want to improve your speaking skill, not only you can check the activities on the website, but also use the forumsand MyEC section to find pen pals and communicate with other English speakers. Moreover, I think the content is original as well. You don’t see typical topics to teach certain vocabulary but some different functional content. The site allows you to contribute articles as a guest for the learners of English. In addition, EC is written mainly in British English. But they have pages about other varieties of English such as American or Canadian. Overall I liked the content they have so far.
The Accuracy, the Broken Links and the Images
As I went through the content of the website I haven’t seen any mistakes or irrelevant, unrelated topics or stuff. Even if you encounter some spellings that you can take as a mistake, do not act on a whim! In fact they’re not spelled wrong, they are just written/pronounced in either American accent or Canadian. Although everything was going so well, I didn’t like the website’s organization. I find it quite dense. The images of the websites are in high quality and mostly relevant to the topics they are presented in. There’re lots of exterior links in the website and I tried a few of them and they were working just fine. I don’t think you can see a broken link as the site gets updates frequently.
Is it applicable to EFL teaching?
After all these points I’ve discussed in this post, I believe that the website is already meant for EFL/ESL learners and teachers and I can say that it can be applied in EFL teaching. Teachers can benefit from the worksheets and lesson plans of the website and they can still use it as an online tool as well since the website has lots of online activities, games etc. Students can use EC easily at school and at home yet the website lacks attractiveness for students, it is just so simple.
My overall evaluation is that we can make EnglishClub as a part of our classrooms as it has useful sections and keeps students engaged.
Pay a visit to EnglishClub and tell me if you agree with me or not in the comments section below. One more thing, if you already have some websites you use for English, put those in your comments as well.
I hope you enjoy my evaluation.
Thanks,
K.
A linguaphile's notes 