Online English Lessons' Many Choices | The Communication Blog

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Online English Lessons' Many Choices

By Adriana Noton

No matter why you are looking into English classes, there are many choices. Perhaps you need to improve your own English skills even it's your native language. Maybe you need to learn enough just for a short vacation in the U. S. Or you need to have an in depth course where you will become fluent in a short period of time. Whatever your reason, there are many online English lessons from which to choose.

There's a chance you might even be able to get what you need just by using a free online service or blog. Usually these are open to the public and you can check out the entire course for no obligation. You might even try a few lessons to see how it goes. In any case, it's a good idea to figure out ahead of time exactly what you want to learn and what you hope to gain so that you can research appropriately and choose accordingly.

The purpose of each course will defer, of course. There is a big difference between a quick 10 week course that will teach you conversation English, and a course lasting a few years where you learn to decline nouns and conjugate verbs. If you are heading to New York City for a vacation and just need to get around town, choose restaurants, find bathrooms, and get on the right subway, that quickie ten week course might be perfect.

Online English lessons will all use different methodologies to help you in learning English. Some use nothing more than tables to memorize, usually reminiscent of our early years in school when we had to memorize vocabulary, poetry, spelling and even math equations. Others will use formal language lessons where you take it one step at a time, much as you'd learn back in high school. Here's a verb, here's a noun, put together a sentence.

Many of the courses provide feedback in the form of sound and pronunciations. You can click on word or even an icon and hear someone pronounce the word, or translate the idea. Many of the college programs actually force you to have a computer with a microphone so that you can speak and get graded on your accent.

Let's not forget about homework! Whether you are signing up for a self paced program or a formalized college course, you will have some type of studying and homework. Of course, these assignments are always 'open book', or 'open web page' since there is no other way to get around it. However, if you are taking a test, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you were to always check the website or your notes for help with spelling or translation guidelines.

If you are enrolled in an online college course, you will most likely be working with a specific instructor and required to log in at determined times, just like going to class. Depending on the software being used you should be able to 'meet' your classmates via web cams, and you can either verbally discuss or write comments and questions to share with the class and / or the teacher.

Courses range from free to thousands of dollars. You get out of a course what you put into it. Cheating won't help, and expecting too much from a free course with a small syllabus won't do much good either.

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