Learning English with the internet

When I first started teaching English (way before the days of the internet) students and teachers used coursebooks. Although I think that coursebooks are useful – they provide a structure to learn grammar and skills – if you're learning English now, there are so many other ways to use and practise English.

Here are some excellent ways to use the internet for learning English:

Join a community

It's easier to learn when you've got someone to practise with. By chatting and sharing ideas with other people, your focus is on communicating for a different reason than just learning a language.

For example, in the longest-running thread on the Penpals forum, people from around the world ask each other questions about culture, life, and many other subjects. It's a forum for exchanging ideas and information – not for getting your writing corrected. And an interesting thing has happened in the two years the thread has developed: the writing ability of the forum posters has improved through reading each other's posts, and using new vocabulary, phrases and sentence structure.

Of course, english-at-home.com isn't the only community for learning English. Livemocha has over two million members learning different languages together.

- Keep in touch using social media
Write a blog, get on twitter, comment on websites… You can follow me on twitter (send tweets and I'll follow you back!) or become a fan on our facebook page. The more you contact people, the more you practise English.

Ask questions

Got a question you need an answer to, but no teacher on hand to ask? Lots of language learning sites provide forums where you can ask questions about English. Our Help Me! forum is one place, but there are plenty of others, such as english forums.

Improve your language skills

There are tons and tons of great sites for helping you improve your English. Here are just some of them – feel free to add to the list!

- Watch videos on youtube, and improve your listening skills and vocabulary.

For example, watch The Flatmates, a BBC learning soap opera.

- Record your own video clips on 12seconds with your webcam or mobile phone and share with your friends, or family.

- Improve your pronunciation by listening to English words on forvo.

- Make your own vocabulary "word clouds" with wordle. It's often easier to remember something visual, and wordle makes coloured images of the words or text you upload.

- Read and listen to the news on the BBC

Help a friend learn English