Learn To Love Learning English: ELLLO

Hello there!

I've been gone for a while but I'm back again with another great topic. This week we've covered websites in our course and as an assignment, we were asked to make an evaluation of a website of our choosing which is all about learning English. I chose to write about Elllo. This is a very interesting and helpful website which I came across while searching for a website to evaluate. Now, I'd like to give you a general information about this website as a whole and then move on to a specific part of it which I think is very helpful and appealing. If you are ready, let's start!

The photo was taken from here

 

 

What is elllo? 

The site name, elllo, stands for English Listening Library Online. Elllo offers free listening activities for students learning English as another language. Currently there are over 2000 listening activities on the site.

The creator of the website is Todd Beuckens who has been teaching English for over twenty years. He is currently teaching in Japan. He created elllo.org in 2003 as part of a MA TESOL graduate school project. Each week he publishes two new, free listening lessons.












The content of the website is very diverse. There are over 2,500 free lessons available on the website. Along with these, there are many different activities on the site, all of which focus on listening. However, each activity type has a unique design to focus on different skills as noted below:

• Views: Listen as speakers from around the world discuss various topics. Students can listen to the audio, read the script, take a quiz, and learn vocaulary.

• Videos: Students can watch short videos, most less than a minute, of speakers from around the world answering a question.

• Mixer: Listen to six people answering the same question. These activities come with a quiz, transcript, and flash slide show with captions.

• New Center: These lessons focus on academic English. Students listen to a short, animated news segment and take a quiz.

• Games: Students can listen to a short audio segment and choose the best picture that matches the audio. Great for beginners!

• Scenes: These two mini-series on elllo focus on every day life. Audio lessons come with multimedia (captions), quiz, and audio vocabulary.

• STeP: Students can practice academic English and work on test tasking skills and reading speed with these activities.

• Audio Notes: Most activities come with audio notes, which are short explanations of key terms or interesting language from the activity. The audio notes often focus on language that is colloquial, figurative, or new to the students.

The target audience is everybody who wants to learn English or improve their current level of English. Students can use the site to practice English by working on listening, reading, vocabulary and even pronunciation and speaking. 

The aim of the site it to make learning English fun, effective, and free and to provide teachers and students with materials that you cannot find in traditional textbooks.

Although I was not able to see any dates on the website, according to "About the Creator" page, new lessons are published each Monday. Todd Beuckens also claims that each week he publishes two new, free listening lessons.

Views

Today I’m going be evaluating the “Views” section of the website. These pages are primarily audio interviews with various speakers talking about a wide range of topics. The speech is unscripted so the language is more natural and authentic than language in textbooks. All activities come with a quiz, vocabulary lessons, and downloadable audio. New activities come with a multi-media audio slide show with caption support, so students can read in sync with the audio. These activities are mainly dialogues but occasionally monologues.

The activity opens up with and audio interview about a topic, in this case, “Brush and Shave”.  The learners are to listen to the audio recorded by Todd, the creator of the website, and a guest. The transcription of the audio is also avaliable to the learners. There is also “Vocab” and “Quiz” section next to the transcription. The learners can study some unknown vocabulary items, listen to their pronunciation, and see the words used in sentences. In the “Quiz” section, the learners are expected to answer questions about the interview they have just listened. On the right side of the page, there is a “Vocabulary Challenge” part where the learners can put the words that they have learned into use and get immediate feedback on their answers.

In some of the lessons, there is also “Free Printable Lesson / Study Pack” section which is very handy for us, teachers. You can obtain the PDF file of the everything that I’ve just mentioned, also the answer key and bonus audio. 

The language presented in the website is accurate and safe to rely on. Since they are created by a teacher who has over twenty years of experience in this field, the learners can feel free to immerse themselves into the material available without a doubt. I did not observe any broken links on the website. The audio, video and text materials presented are high quality and suitable to the learners’ needs. 

I find websites which offer you a chance to learn something new very appealing myself as a learner. They help you improve yourself as a human being. As I am all about improvement, I’d definitely recommend this website to my students and every teacher who seeks for an opportunity to develop themselves in their occupation. ELLLO is a great way to expose students from same or different levels of English to free materials designed to improve their English. As teachers, we can definitely make use of these materials avaliable on the website in our classrooms to make our teaching more enjoyable and fun.

For the information given above please click here and here
You can visit elllo by clicking here