About ESL go.com
ESL go.com was created to provide students from all over the world a chance to practice their English. I also wanted to make life a little easier for English teachers (including myself) by organizing activities I'd created and making them easily accessible on the web. ESL go.com is completely free to use. I use advertisements to defray the costs involved: computer hardware and software, domain names, and web hosting. I hope that one day the ads will help pay for all the time I have put into building ESL go.com. For now, the knowledge that I'm helping people learn English and the awards that ESL go.com has received, are compensation enough.
ESL go has two main sections: the student's section and the teacher's section.
The idea for the student's section originally came to me while I was teaching a computer English course in Hangook University of Foreign Studies' intensive English program. One of the main goals of the course was to help students learn to use computers to study on their own after the course had finished. However, of all the free ESL sites, none seemed to be based on the principles of a communicative language classroom.
The sites provided grammar and/or vocabulary exercises, but none of them personally involved the learner. None of them allowed for the learner to communicate, to convey his/her persona to other people. I feel that the main use of language to to convey one's thoughts and feelings and that language learning can not ignore this.
However, as I showed students the best English learning web sites I could find, it became clear that most of them did ignore students thoughts and concentrated on boring grammar drills. I worried that when my students graduated from the intensive English program, they would lose their only chance to study and use English with guidance from a teacher. Like many skills, if students don't use their English, they will lose their English.
I don't want English students to lose the skill they've worked so hard to achieve.
ESL go.com aims to provide grammar and vocabulary activities that guide students toward expressing themselves. Grammar isn't studied for fun, it's studied so that it can be used to communicate.
The student's section consists of free online classes, discussion boards, quizzes, and a
store provided in association with Amazon.com.
I started the teacher's section because I have so many worksheets and other activities lying around. Eventually I hope to get all the stuff I've created online so I don't need to keep binders full of activities I've used and created.
The teacher's section consists of resorces which can be used in the classroom, and a
store provided in association with Amazon.com. In addition,
teachers are welcome to use the message boards to express their own ideas and should encourage their students to use the boards. It is hoped that using the message boards will help students develop their English outside the classroom.
There are a number of people who have helped me create this site. I would especiallly like to thank Rainbo Rick from RainboRick's Tools and Scripts for Webmasters for helping me with html, javascript, and css. Also, thanks to Matt Stanton of CyberEFL for javascript help.