Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[khafdan]

Hi there!

I am an EFL teacher doing some research on learning English online. What sites do you visit the most? Do you think the present sites are good enough? What disadvantages are there? I know a lot of questions

[Fugger]

Well, I've not a lot of experience with learning english online. The amount of websites makes it difficult for me to find the best ones.
The site i've visited the most is the following : http://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/Browser/Browser01.aspx?path=%2fUniversit%c3%a4t+T%c3%bcbingen%2fNeuphilologische+Fakult%c3%a4t%2fSeminar+f%c3%bcr+Englische+Philologie%2f
You can listen to a recorded lecture about english grammar. Unfortunately there are only readings on the present tense. I think it is intended for business students. This is the only website I've found that provides an audio lecture. I liked it alot. I think, or at least I hope, I've improved my english a little bit.

[khafdan]

Do you think that you gain anything from the internet that you couldn't gain from a face-to-face lecture, or cassettes etc? Do you think that the internet brings anything new to the learning experience?

[Fugger]

If I would have the money, I would hire a language teacher or take trips to australia or england. Unfortunately I've not the money .
Hence I use the internet and there are several advantages. It gives me access to texts composed by native english speakers at no charge. And it is easy to look up unknown words using the babylon translator or an online dictionary.

Probably one can achieve the same with a grammar book and a dictionary but this would be more time consuming and costly.

I think having access to a great many texts is the greatest gain for me so far (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/).

I haven't used chats or discussions board yet (this is my first try) , so I really can't say anything about this aspect.