The Future of Language Learning: How the Internet has Changed ESL

Learning a new language has changed a lot over the last 50 years.  Modern coursebooks have fewer grammatical terms and more pictures than they did in the middle of the 20th century; teaching methods have shifted their focus from lecturing to making the classroom fun and interactive.

SEE ALSO: The Benefits of Using Technology in ESL classroom

Nothing, however, has brought more radical change to learning than computers, and with them, the Internet.  Technology development has in fact made learning languages much easier, so the modern ESL student needs to know how to take advantage of these innovations and avoid their pitfalls.

4 Ways the Internet has made ESL easier

1.  Less of a need for dictionaries and other support

In the old days, students reading English-language newspapers and books had to manually open their dictionaries every other sentence to look up words.

Nowadays, powerful browsers such as Chrome make it possible to simply hold the cursor over a word and a tiny box pops up displaying the meaning.  This is powered by Google Translate, and it saves an enormous amount of time when reading articles and other content online.  All students should take advantage of this, and you’d have to be a fool not to.

There’s also software for this purpose called ShaPlus Google Translator if you’d rather not have to use Chrome.

2.  The opportunity to interact with people from around the world

Software such as Skype has made it possible to easily get together with people in cyberspace and practice English.  There’s hardly a need to explain this.  Try making friends with English-speakers who are studying your language.  Social networking sites have made this an everyday activity!

3.  The opportunity to hear more than one dialect

In the old days, there were certainly English-language films available around the world, but now it’s possible to introduce more diversity into learning.  For one thing, students can watch TV channels and listen to radio from all over the world on sites like live-radio.net and wwitv.com.  Students should get used to hearing more than one type of English.

Try listening to radio programs from Scotland, England, the United States, and Australia.  In fact, the IELTS exam tests students’ ability to understand more than one dialect.  Wherever you happen to live in the world, you’re likely to encounter more than one type of English, so learn to understand all of them.

4.  Large amounts of informal, unedited English

One of the nice things about the Internet is that anyone can write online, whether in blogs, on social networking sites, or in comments under YouTube videos.  The advantage of this is that you can see “real” English with all of its imperfections.  In older times, students only saw material that was either edited by a publisher or specially written for students.  Now you can see lots of raw, informal, uncensored English.

While this is absolutely necessary and a great opportunity to learn how real people speak, it’s important to remember that even native speakers make mistakes in spelling and grammar.  Just because the writer is American or British doesn’t mean the English is flawless.  Also, the writer’s origin might not even be known! You could be reading your mama’s blog and not even know it!

Photo credit: nooccar / Foter / CC BY-NC