OK so there are numerous websites out there to teach people English. In a recent Google search, I found a number of these websites also have blogs on them. One such site is called "Learn English" and can be found at: http://kliktrans.com. This website is geared toward adult learners and provides a number of resources.
The main resource is the weekly blog giving tips and tricks on learning English. The most recent blog, titled "Understanding the Apostrophe," provides commentary about the difficulty of the English language and uses the apostrophe as an example. The blog is written is very difficult academic language using complex sentence structures and vocabulary. A beginning English language learner (ELL) would not be able to access this information. Rules regarding the use of the apostrophe are presented, but in paragraph form. I find it is much better to list rules numerically in a chart-like format making them easier for the ELL to compare the different rules. Additionally, the author gives very few examples of each rule.
Another resource on the site is the link to audio materials. The author links YouTube videos and resources provided from readers of the site. These videos are very appropriate for the ELL. The quality of the videos is good and the speakers on the video speak loudly, clearly, and slowly. The only problem here is that there are only seven audio resources provided and they do not provide a very large range of lessons.
The additional resources are not that exciting and are just more blogs or links based on a number of different categories of learning English. Within these links, the author talks about Google quite a bit as a tool for learning English. I don't know the relationship between the author/website and Google, but there could be.
One annoying thing about the website is that the author talks about losing his job and also makes a number of spelling errors. Also, the website is not very comprehensive, meaning it lacks a lot of information on basic skills and gives no sense of what needs to be learned first in order to learn a more difficult skill. It is a haphazard conglomerate of resources. Perhaps the author is not an expert in language learning, which makes me ask, why even build the site?
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Tara,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your evaluation on http://kliktrans.com. I agree that the blog is written in not-an-easy-English for everybody to understand.
I also chedked his suggestions about using Google for language learning. I don't know either whether the author is somehow related to Google or not, but I would say definitely not, based on his web-publishing skills--his blog does not look professional.
Speaking of the design, this sometimes affects the readers' perception about the credibility of the web content. Based on your comments on the writing style and the blog design, I don't know whether I should trust his suggestions about English learning.
Tara,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comments about the Learn English site. It seems similar to the one I found, Better @ English, in that there is an abundance of Google Ads and reliance on external links. As Daehyeon mentioned in my post, the authors receive funding from different sources and need to advertise, but it makes it so difficult to navigate and lessens the credibility of the site. Although, I did enjoy the audio resources. It was helpful that the videos included text and audio.
Tara,
ReplyDeleteLooking at the http://kliktrans.com blog made me think about something: you don't need an English degree to have a blog about English. That is why the material might seem to be unprofessional from time to time.
As for the ads, don't the authors of the websites get paid for every link to an ad that is clicked on their site? If so, maybe that is why he has so many links. He is unemployed and has bills to pay.