The Web offers nowadays a wide range of sites and resources to learn a new language. We already knew about the existence of a series of websites that are working as communities where you can learn and put into practice the language in an international environment. But which are the real possibilities these sites can offer us as language learners?. After browsing the web and getting a rough idea of the most popular ones, we designed a research procedure to be followed by everyone in our work team. The guidelines were as follows:
1 - Country of origin (UK?France?Italy?USA?...) e-address, contact, how long it's been running
2 - Is there any need of registration? is it free? do they ask you to pay for some fee? how much? 3- Has it got a chat? videoconference? does it include oral and written production? 4 - Profile of participants (number of members, sex, age, studies, nationalities/native speakers) 5 - Are there any teachers supervising the language being used or is it just free production without any language control? 6 - Is it easy to be used? is it regularly updated? would you recommend it to Spanish students? why (not)?-overall assessment of website (rate it 1-5) Overall assessment: ☺☺☺ The name “Busuu” comes from a dying language only spoken by eight people in Cameroon. Apart from creating a fine tool to learn languages, the two young founders of the website have ambitious plans. Actually, they are attempting to raise awareness about nearly extinct languages such as Busuu and Squamish (native Canadian).
Busuu website is a platform with a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Users are people from all over the world and both sexes, but mainly from South America, Europe, Australia, Russia and its surrounding countries. The age of the users ranges from 15 up to 75 years old, or even older.
Registration is needed. You must set which languages you speak as well as which languages you would like to learn, selecting the beginner, intermediate or advanced level. Nowadays, they offer seven languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, but the number of languages is increasing. Two kind of membership are available: Premium and Free. Premium membership (payment, though free 7-days trial period) is great: downloadable & printable PDFs of units; audio files , audio podcasts, video units, listening comprehension exercises; grammar units and customized reviews. Free membership has more limited features than the Premium, but enough to start learning. Prices of the Premium membership range from €15.99 monthly fee (1 month) up to €5.99 monthly (12 months).
Although you can exchange conversation with native people, there aren't any teachers supervising the language being used, however, you can report an abuse. Another drawback is that your writing will be corrected by native people but not teachers...and what’s more, you will have to correct compositions of the languages you speak as a native or advanced level! José Luis Llorens
Palabea.net
Overall assessment: ☺☺☺
Matthias Spanic, a former teacher of Spanish in Berlin, founded this site, which is located in a German Server, in 2007. Its clear interface and simple design make Palabea very user-friendly. Once you have registered and declared which language you know and which one(s) you intend to learn, all the tools and resources that the site provides are free. So, what are you waiting for to sign up and start to improve your language skills?.
In the site, you can learn English with a lot of modern multimedia methods: textchat and/or videochat, podcasts, video lesson, dictionaries, and also submit, read and edit documents. The exact number of members is unknown, but most users are young people wishing to learn and improve a language. There aren’t any teachers supervising the language being used, which from my point of view is a great drawback, but the best of all is that you can contact native speakers quite easily. As soon as your profile is visible, you get friend requests (I got 7 in a week!).
Palabea doesn’t have any publicity interfering your navigation, but there are partners, such as languages schools and broadcasting companies sponsoring the website, and there is even a link where users can give away their donations to improve the web and a fan boutique with merchandising stuff. Carolina Cortés
LingQ’s online language learning system is developed by The Linguist Institute, a company located in Vancouver, Canada, and founded by Steve Kaufmann and his son Mark. According to Kaufmann, the LingQ method has everything you need to practice all the skills and become fluent in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Japanese. The website is up-to-date and new material is continuously being added.
All you need to join the LingQ online community is a computer with an Internet connection and register. If you are willing to pay for it, unlimited graduated lessons will be available; if not, a free account offers you 5 lessons and the chance to try resources such as getting help from a tutor, joining live conversations with students from all over the world, taking part in interesting blogs and forums, learning new vocabulary, listening and downloading podcasts and writing your compositions which will be corrected by tutors.
Although I enjoyed the experience of a two-week free trial, I think I would not pay for the subscription. The interaction in the website is quite nice, but the grammar and vocabulary sections are not very convincing since I did not find them quite effective, actually I found them a bit too boring. María Silva.
MY LANGUAGE EXCHANGE
Overall assessment: ☺☺☺ “My Language Exchange” was founded in 2001 in Montreal by Helene Cournier and Dan Yuen with the purpose of helping students of foreign languages to meet native speakers of the languages they are studying. As the homepage indicates, over one million users from 130 different countries practice over 115 languages, from Armenian to Zulu. It is free to sign up as a regular member, a possibility that offers learners to participate in group discussions, post messages in the bulletin board and reply to gold members’ messages and emails. On the other hand, gold members must pay a fee that ranges from 6$ a month to 24$ a year. The advantage of being a gold member is that you can contact any member of the site, whereas as a regular member you can only reply to those gold members who have contacted you.
Language exchange with other members is carried out through the text chat and the voice chat, and there is also the possibility of meeting penpals. Other appealing aspect of this site is the bulletin board, a forum for discussions quite useful where members help each other to clear their doubts and make suggestions (for instance, you can recommend books or films that may be useful in the learning process). To sum up, “My Public Exchange” is an interesting web page for second language learners, although accessibility is limited if you are not a gold member. Ricardo Hernando.
WIZIQ http://www.wiziq.com/
Overall assessment: ☺☺ ☺☺ I've been browsing through different sites and signed up and ask for some information to see if their content is really regularly updated, which are supervised by qualified persons and so on, and the truth is that nobody has answered me. I have a bad experience with online courses so I am reluctant to learn a subject in this way. I've been navigating on Talk and learn and Busuu. Finally, I chose wiziq because I think it is the best site to maintain feedback with people not only with a teacher but with people in general. I spoke in a chat and conversations have been very interesting. Furthermore, WiZiQ community seemed the most reliable, and the best to advertise and communicate with the public. This community is in YouTube, Twitter and Facebook too.
WiZiQ is an online learning platform. The site is designed to help students and teachers meet partners and to provide an online virtual classroom learning environment.
The site was started by Harman Singh (India). WiZiQ's Alexa traffic rank for India places it among the top 1,000 highest traffic sites, and its global Alexa traffic rank exceeds many of its competitors (Edufire, Myngle, Sclipo, GuruFi). WiZiQ has also been featured on Mashable, ZDNet, NYTimes, Silicon India, Sramana Mitra's blog (who is a columnist for Forbes), and other blogs.The age of the users ranges from 18 up to 75 years old, or even older.Teachers provide lessons in standardized tests. The WiZiQ virtual classroom runs using a web browser and Adobe Flash. On the site one can find online tests, tutorials, and recorded classes. WiZiQ also serves as a social networking site to bring together educators and students from around the world. There is no vetting of the teachers on the site, as anybody can become a teacher and anybody can be a student. Teachers upload their profiles advertising what they can teach, tutorials, their experience and their credentials and students can run searches, find recorded classes to watch, tutorials to take, or teachers to work with.
One of the most distinguishing features of WiZiQ is that it offers class sizes of up to 500 people for a low price. In other respects it has similar features to other e-learning, web conferencing and other online learning platform providers. Estela Gomariz Calderón
www.kantalk.com Overall assessment: ☺☺ ☺☺
KanTalk is “a cool fun community, a free space where you can practice spoken English” (or any other language, there are many more from Portuguese to Slovak). It started in January 2007. After registering you can edit your profile and you can even record your voice so people can get to know you better. You can make friends by sending people you might be interested in a message and later be accepted by them, the same procedure as in Facebook. Actually, one of the best things about this community is that you can use your oral abilities by means of a Skype account but also by producing your own recordings (it’s really easy!) and sharing them with anyone who would like to listen to you and answer with any other recording. From my viewpoint, this video and recording option is one of the best things the site offers. I also browsed the list of groups and their interests. One of the most popular groups are for instance “Beginners English in Skype” with 333 members or “Pronunciation of English” with 211 member, but most of the groups are not very active, maybe because everybody can create a group. Groups can deal with many subjects of interest from Photo Poetry to 2008 Beijing Olympic Games or the videogame Call of Duty, but also with Grammar, Skills (Reading & Writing, Listening & Speaking) and even test preparation (FCE, IELTS, TOEFL). I decided to ask for permission to belong to a group (Book Club). Each group has got a Discussion Board with the possibility of participating in different discussion threads, so I took part in some discussion. Then, I made a Polish friend, Wojtek. Later, I followed some lessons about Brazil and Internet addiction, based on an interesting article from The New York Times: “If your kids are awake, they are probably online”). I discovered that I could contact through Skype with people who were online and I decided to talk to an interesting Canadian teacher, Kyran Kennedy, who lives in Ontario. He is a very active member of Kan Talk (he’s got 121 friends!) Of course I would recommend you this site (although better not keep high expectations). I am sure you will find someone interesting to talk to. Lola Alemany
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