Preference English website to learn English

Now days, there are various ways to learning English. Most people will commonly taking certain English course to improve their English. Nevertheless, there are also numerous people that prefer to use another media like internet. Using the internet connection, People could open various websites that are useful for increasing their English comprehension.Website for learning English usually provides video, audio, and reading materials so that people can experience learning with various forms. By the invention of English website, learning is no longer with just sitting in class and listening teacher explanation. There are abundant total of good English websites offered when you search it on Google. I want to give a brief review of one website that is appealing for upgrading the English skill recently. The website is www.englishcentral.com.

www.englishcentral.com. is a full-English site which presents so many interesting videos and provide it with subtitle and question to test viewers’ understanding at the end of the play. This website claims that it is the leading provider of online English conversation solutions. The material here are the arrangement of web’s best English video, a proprietary Intellispeech assessment technology and an adaptive vocabulary learning system and live tutor.

             How does the website work?

www.englishcentral.com is so easy to use. The options presented are simple and understandable even for the beginner website user. In the picture below, there are several options in the left side of the site that related to topic of the videos, while there are several skills provided at the bottom of topic options.

Viewers may choose the topic that they interest most, and the learning video will appear based on the topic chosen. The skills as well, there are 5 basic skills offered in here, communication, grammar, pronunciation, test preparation, and vocabulary building.

The level of learner comprehension is also available here; see the three options displayed above the list of video. By clicking the level of learner—beginner, intermediate, advanced, viewers can watch the video that is most suitable for their intelligence level. Beginner is usually for people who learn English for not a long time, intermediate is specifically for the one who already taking several courses of English and know a bit of basic English rule, while an advance option is for people who are almost mastered this language and now how to use the language properly in real life context.

At the upper right side of the website, there is a search option, account option, and the language option. Below is the view of account information. Using this feature, viewers can create their own account and join other people in this English community. they can see their entire progress, rank among all the viewer in this website, and the vocabulary that they have already acquired so far.

. All the new vocabulary that is presented in the learning video is listed in ‘my words’ option, it is precisely below the search option. When this option is clicked, the list of words from the video watched before is automatically shown.

When the viewers already choose the topic, the level, and the skill by clicking them, the list of videos will appear. The next step is to choose the video. The picture below on the previous page is one of the video that appear when the viewers choose a grammar skill. There will be several units which are related to the grammar selected. Right above the video, there are three option of the learning progress—watch, learn, and speak. In ‘watch’ option, viewers will simply watch the video with the English subtitle at the bottom.

When the viewers click the ‘learn’ option, the website will test viewers skill by requesting them to fill in the blank; fill the missing word. The purpose of this test is to gain a new vocabulary related to the content and to test the writing ability. Meanwhile, viewers can test how well their pronunciation by clicking the ‘speak’ option. In this section, the website will ask the viewers to follow what the speaker in the video said in order to find out the proper way to pronounce those words.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the page there is several items related to the website, there is even the face book page on the right bottom of this site. If the viewers have a face book, they can like the englishcentral.com page and join other friends in face book that also use this website.

             What are the pros?

There are quite a few advantages of using this website as an online language tutor. First, it provides a distinctive topics (e.g. academic english, bussiness english, etc) that the viewers can choose based on what they are interested the most. The lever of learner is also quite advantageous thing due to the fact that viewers IQ level of the language may be different from one another. By three levels provided in this website, viewers can decide which one the most comforts and fits their IQ level well.

This website also offers a set of specific skill that the viewers may choose. If they want to master the grammar, just simply select the ‘grammar’ skill, when they want to improve their communication skill, they can choose that skill and the video will manually directed based on specific skill needed.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that vocabulary acquisition is a crucial component to language acquisition and fluency. www.englishcentral.com  has developed a unique vocabulary learning tool that has over 20,000 headwords. They stated that the power of their system rests in the use of "in-content" learning that allows users to see multiple examples (and collocations) of words from authentic video clips

The core of the website system is with using video as a media to enhance people English ability. What is special about this website is the use of contextual teaching, it is a real world emphasis on teaching. In other words, relating what is being taught into the context of the real situation. So viewers can acquiring the new vocabulary and skill as well as knowing how to use it properly in the real life context. By watch the video and fill in the blank, viewers know the use of certain words right in the content. This site also very useful to increase the ability of pronouncing the words because of the ‘speak’ feature in here. There is also the rank space that can grade as well as track the viewers process of learning which is very helpful to measure how far the viewers can follow the tutor.

There is also no advertisement which are usually appear in common websites. With no add, this website looks so exclusively sophisticated, it looks high-class as well.

www.englishcentral.com also show the process of mastering the language by giving a short but meaningful explanation in one picture. It will make the viewers more interested to learn here. Another benefit of this picture is to increase their motivation to boost their English ability in here.

This website even confirm that they have been adopted in huge amount of universities from all over the world. As the picture illustrated above, several famous universities abroad already join this website. This website popularity will make the viewers gradually trust it to improve their English. The view of 400 universities as well as the companies that work together with www.englishcentral.com made this website sounds really fascinating and trustworthy.

             What are the cons?

It is such a pity that this website only presented in a few language. There is even no Indonesian language available here. It is a little bit hard for the viewers that haven’t master English really well. The website also require a registration of email/ face book to learn further. Imagine if the viewers do not have email or face book account, they cannot open the course and video, as the result, this website will be inefficient.

Another con in here is that the score/rank after practicing the material will be terrible if the viewers pronounce the words not exactly like the speaker. In fact, people speak the same word a little differently because of the diversity of the accent. So it is quite hard to achieve a high score if the viewers cannot utter the word and set the intonation precisely like the speaker in the video.

Overall, I’m very satisfied using this website and I found it really helpful for those who want to upgrade their English ability, especially in speaking and vocabulary building.