5 applications to boost your English
After I had finished my BA, I had more than 4 months of holidays before I started my MA studies. I worked as an EFL teacher in a primary school and I thought everything was going smoothly with my life.
Little did I know – my command of English after four months of using it on primary level was, well, to put it mildly, certainly not on academic level, and it took me a while to catch up. At the moment I’m using English more often (why, even this blog started as my writing practice!), but I usually have at least one group on at least C1 level, just to make my English actually work.
Well, I have no problem believing that some of my fellow teachers may experience similar traumas – so today I want to help everyone struggling with keeping up with English by sharing my favourite applications to learn English. You may recommend them to your students, but I encourage you to try them on your own – I do:
6 Minute English
It’s a nice application that helps you learn intermediate English through simple English Conversations from BBC Learning English Program: 6 Minute English, English At Work, The English We Speak etc. Each lesson comes with audio, a transcript and a vocabulary list and frankly, I find it more useful to our students, however, apart from the obvious benefit of regular listening exercises we can use this app to introduce some of these podcasts to our classroom. Worth checking!
thefreedictionary
I seriously used to spend some time in bed, before I went to sleep, playing Hangman or Spelling Bee on this app, because Thefreedictionary is more than just an alphabetised collection of vocabulary items . There are interesting articles, inspirational quotes, games, holidays and even a horoscope (which always predicts something nice to happen, so I think one can trust it). If you have IWB, you can just go to the page and leave your classroom having fun with a dictionary – it’ll be so easy to convince them to use it on their own!
memrise
You can learn English with memrise and that’s OK – it’s an app designed to learn languages in a creative and fun way. What I do, though, is learning Spanish through English. It helps me not only learn a new language, but also revise the one I already know. It’s also a great idea from a neurodidactical point of view – you create more connotations which boosts your learning abilities. It works for me!
LearnEnglish Grammar by the British Council
Sometimes I start to suspect my grammar is not what it used to be back in my university days – and just to prove I can still do an exercise or three on C1 level, I find no better application than the one by the British Council (in fact the BC has a lot of cool apps and I strongly recommend you to try them all). We might be teachers, but it’s useful to practise grammar once in a while, isn’t it?
knudge.me
This is my favourite application at the moment – spaced repetitions, adaptive learning, infographics, gamification… and practising things up to C1 level! And not only vocabulary – you may decide to work on phrasal verbs, common confusing words or idioms. I downloaded this app just to test it, and here I am, using it more and more actively everyday as it’s not only useful, but pretty and witty, and it definitely got me.
I hope you’ll like my ideas – if you have your favourite apps, please, share them in the comments, I’ll be happy to test some more.
Thanks!
Thank you for the mention. We really appreciate it. We hope the app helps all English learners like yourself. Happy Learning!
I really have a lot of fun with your app, it’s challenging, but also a lot of fun 🙂 Great stuff, thank you <3
Szkoda, że knudge nie ma na IOSa… bo też lubie, a rzadko korzystam z kompa. 6 minutes i thefreedictionary tez uzywam. Memrise kiedys mialam, ale do rosyjskiego, ale hmm znudzil mi sie.
Uzywam diki gdy potrzebuje sprawdzic slowko z pl na ang a takze kilka aplikacji do czytania po ang:squid i news app
Dzięki za komentarz 🙂 Co do memrise się zgadzam – za dużo powtórzeń, a to revision na czas po prostu mnie już męczy :/
Squida nie znałam, przetestuję – dzięki za podzielenie się 🙂
Thank you so much!
My pleasure 🙂