Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 1; January 2001

LearnEnglish website

Introduction

The LearnEnglish website is a new British Council for learners of English. It aims to show learners how English from the UK is fun and exciting, and encourage them to enrol on courses either in their own country or in the UK. The site went live in early May 2000 and is already attracting 39,000 visits per month (resulting in over 400,000 "hits").

We are now working with the Centre for English Language Studies in Education (CELSE) at Manchester University to evaluate the site to ensure that it is useful for the learners who use it and to gain insights into the learning that it is designed to support.

The site's address is: www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish

Context

David Eastment (1999) has reported that there are thousands of websites offering English language learning, most of dubious pedagogical quality with poor design and production values. Over the past 18 months better quality sites have emerged, many from the USA, which require learners to register with them for a range of free and paid for learning via downloadable exercises, chat rooms, and "classes" using voice/ video conferencing. The British Council itself has been offering "Online English" in which learners can sign up for courses which combine face-to-face learning and package of self-study via CD-ROM and a website containing discussion areas and more interactive learning activities.

This latter course reflects the belief that effective language learning still requires the presence of a teacher (sometimes face to face, sometimes virtual) and a time-bound programme of learning. Inevitably, this tends to be as costly to offer as a "traditional" course though there can be economies of scale in the longer term and more flexibility for the learner, teacher and institution.

LearnEnglish has been designed to be a free site for the vast number of learners who are unable or unwilling to enrol on a course or wish to supplement their existing courses. It aims to offer learners "useful" learning experiences, help them analyse and reflect upon their learning needs, and serve as a "portal" to a range of other useful sites. It does not aim to offer a course or programme of learning, and focuses on the more "fun" areas of language learning. And it aims to promote English language learning courses and materials from the United Kingdom.

The aim of helping learners reflect on learning is, I think, important and worthwhile, and one that we are supporting with features such as "How I learned English", "Top tips", and featuring poems from learners and teachers on issues around learning English.

Site map The site offering three separate learning zones for "kids" (aged 8 to 12), "teens" and adults. There is introductory text describing the site in thirteen languages, though after this introduction the rest of the site is presented entirely in English with resources designed for lower intermediate to advanced learners:

Courses

This encourages the learner to sign up for a course, either with a course provider in the UK (Accredited by the British Council) or at one of the British Council's own teaching centres in 60 countries.

Test yourself

Learners are encouraged to sign up for a British Examination, and are also offered a online "Test your level" provided by UCLES (Cambridge Examinations). This is a "semi adaptive" test in which learners have to complete six reading and listening comprehension activities and are then graded as "Elementary", "Intermediate" or "Advanced". This has proved to be the most popular feature of the site in the first three months of operation.

Words

The Wordgames section includes a range of interactive exercises such as word searches and matching exercises, Wordxchange invites learners to submit their favourite words to a database of words on the site. We invite learners to submit topics they would like us to cover in this section, and have had lots of suggestions which we are using.

Grammar

Learners can practise their phrasal verbs in the "Phrasal verbs drinks dispenser" or submit a grammatically well formed but meaningless or impossible sentence to "Chomsky park". Successful submissions include the following:

Black lemon trees eat swimming pools unanimously.
The lively dead boy runs smoothly
a bald man with curly hair.
Blue moons crawl secretly!
Walking trees eat red clouds

Songs

In this section learners can listen to songs by famous UK artists, read the lyrics and work through quizzes and interactive exercises. Artists featured include Oasis, Catatonia, Everything but the girl and All Saints, and this has been a popular section with learners.

Stories and poems

In this section learners can read stories and poems, listen to readings and work through interactive exercises. We have included poems by learners and teachers of English, with the help of Martin Bates, editor of "Poetry as a Foreign Language", and invite learners to submit poems for inclusion to the site. This feature has proved popular, and we have received some delightful poems from learners. We are now working with the writer Tim Rhys on a new section, "Crazy World", which will be an interactive and wacky story set in 2999, due to start in early November 2000.

Magazine

We started this section by asking teachers to ask their students which celebrities they were interested in, and we base our features on their suggestions. This section aims to be topical and over the summer covered pop festivals, the Notting Hill Carnival, and personalities such as Robbie Williams and Ananova (the virtual newsreader). It also has features on how different people learn English, and has sound files of interviews with learners.

Games

Learners can enter a competition, Treasure hunt, and be eligible for a wide range of prizes including free courses in the UK, or get Peedy the Parrot to read out Tongue Twisters. Peedy is a Microsoft "Agent" which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website, will also read out any sentence you choose to type in.

Postcards

Learners can send their friends postcards from the site, and use and adapt messages we have created for them.

Links

Learners have access to a database of links in a range of categories, which have been evaluated by David Eastment and members of the LearnEnglish team.

Launch and learn

Before we started work on the site, we carried out market research which suggested that our audiences would be young, mainly under the age of 30 years, slightly more males than females, and would come mainly from Asia, Latin America and Europe. We get limited information about our audiences from the site statistics package we use and from those visitors who send in contributions or enter competitions. Our policy is not to require visitors to register with the site: this deprives us of potentially very valuable market information, but we feel that being an open site encourages people to visit and trust the site.

We know that visitors spend an average 11 ½ minutes at the site, which sections are most popular, and we invite students to send us feedback. We plan to introduce more structured online questionnaires asking students to comment on specific areas of the site (e.g. which songs do they like, would like to see, and so forth).

All this information is useful and encouraging, but doesn't tell us whether site visitors find what they want and whether they are having an educationally useful experience. We are therefore working with Manchester University's Centre for English Language Studies in Education (CELSE) to carry out a qualitative evaluation of the site, working with teachers who will observe and question their students using the site. We don't know how many definitive answers we'll get to our questions, but we hope that we will understand better how students use the site, and how they feel about it. The evaluation study director, Gary Motteram, will also focus on the nature and quality of the learning experience, and we hope that this will help us improve and create better learning activities in due course. It may also give us a better idea of how useful the web is as a learning tool, and ensure that any claims we make to learners, partners, and those who fund the site are realistic. We also plan to share our findings with the ELT profession, and in this spirit invite teachers to help us in this evaluation (please contact the author at the email address at the end of this article).

The future

We have decided we should make the "Kids" section more separate and distinctive from the "Teens" and "Adults" sections, and to do more work on the sections for Grammar and Links. We are also excited by the new interactive story "Crazy world" already discussed above in Stories and Poems.

Subject to getting additional resources we hope to:

1. Add new zones including a teacher site
2. Introduce "chat" areas, though we will only be able to run these for a few hours a week, as we will need to have teacher moderators.

Ultimately we hope to offer a better learning experience for ever increasing audiences, but we know that there is increased competition (some of which we will link to) and some ELT sites will have very substantial resources. And to keep our funding we will need to demonstrate that we are helping the British Council's objective in reaching wider and younger audiences, and helping them learn English.

Please have a look at the LearnEnglish website, and tell me what you think at the email address below.

Caroline Moore
LearnEnglish Website Manager
ELT Group
The British Council, London
Caroline.moore@britishcouncil.org

References

David Eastment, 1999, "The Internet and ELT", Summertown Publishing and the British Council
David Eastment, 2000, "Portal Combat", Guardian Weekly