Modern Internet services as an assistant for learning and improving English

Modern Internet services as an assistant for learning and improving English

Nowadays English is the leading language of international communication. Everyone can get a good education and create a successful career or just to travel the world with the help of this language. We can often hear English speech among people of different nationalities. Besides, it is the most spoken language in the diplomatic world. It is the language of international relations in the sphere of culture, science, business and politics. More than a billion people on Earth use English in work and life as a second or third language. [1]

In the same time, using the Internet became the daily part of our lives. People now spend very much time on the surfing and communication in the Net. Some of them use different applications for self-development, some – just for communication and making friends. [2]

Thus, we decided to conduct a research within our college, inviting students to improve their level of English through the communication with native speakers using some Internet services. We offered them these four sites:

1. interpals.net
2. Facebook.com/groups/learningrussian
3. vk.com/club48963397
4. lang-8.com

We chose these sites because they are more comfortable and free. Firstly, we tried them ourselves and it helped us to highlight the pros and cons of each service:

The pros and cons of the chosen sties

We offered a group of 30 students to try to communicate with the native speakers using all these sites. Then they received a little questionnaire with the next questions:

1. Какой из предложенных сайтов вам понравился больше?

2. Напишите причины, по которым вы выбрали этот сайт (удобство в пользовании, быстрая регистрация, большое количество пользователей, хороший интерфейс, другая причина - указать)

3. Какой из предложенных сайтов вам не понравился? (отсутствие мобильной версии, неудобный интерфейс, долгая регистрация, недостаточное количество пользователей, другая причина - указать)

4. Расскажите о людях, с которыми вам удалось пообщаться

5. Как вы думаете, помогли ли вам данные сайты в изучении английского? (да, нет и почему)

6. Продолжите ли вы общение на данном сайте и почему?

The students answered the questionnaire and we found out that 73% of them were able to talk with foreigners quite well. The remaining 17% were barely able to do it (someone lost a partner for the long answers, someone wasn’t satisfied with the design/interface of the sites, and someone just didn’t like it). But despite this, the sites received a large number of positive reviews. Considering all the advantages and disadvantages, we took into account the results of the survey, and here's what we found out:

Thus we can see that the service in the vk.com is the most popular among the teenagers, because they have already used to make use of it in their routine life. Lang-8.com was the site that received the most negative reviews, because this interface is comfortable only on computer. In addition, vk.com is often updated and becomes a more convenient place for communication, and it has much more functions for more supportive conversation than lang-8. The remaining two sites received almost the same number of negative reviews, as well as positive ones.

     After the research, we learned how to make English better through the social networking. These sites turned up the good friends that can help everyone to improve English at any level. It proved that nowadays we have very many facilities to develop and make our life better and more successful that is why it is important not to forget about it. In conclusion, we want to remember the famous Russian proverb: “Do not be afraid when you do not know, it is terrible when you do not want to know”.

The list of used literature

1.http://english-in-russia.ru/poleznye-stati/290/

2.http://terralinguistica.ru/archipelago/English.html