Lang-8
http://www.lang-8.com
Fit for all level learners
This website is designed for learners who want to practice their writing skills. It provides six languages for you to choose - English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish and Korean. For example, if you are a traditional Chinese native speaker, you can choose traditional Chinese interface so that all instruction will be presented in traditional Chinese.
This website itself doesn’t provide a very clear introduction. However, once you register for the lang-8 members, they will receive a greeting letter and which contains a brief introduction of Lang-8. Besides, you can also get the access to watch a video about error correction. http://lang-8.com/instruction/correction_en.htm (Error correction)
Lang-8 is a community website where you can communicate and
find friends from all over the world.
In the process, you can better your language abilities by getting your
posts corrected by native speakers, and by correcting the posts of other
users that are in your native language. It is a unique, fun, give and take
community that will knock your socks off when it comes to language learning.
Here’s another Lang-8 introductory film created by one of Lang-8 members. http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=aitMjybzcYU
Lang-8 provides a free space for language learners to learn from each other. There were two major characteristics of this website. First of all, it provides interaction for language learners and real audiences. It is especially benefits for EFL learners who don’t have the chance to interact with native speakers after school. Second, it provides a low-anxiety and friendly learning environment. Learners can easily accept error correction without embarrassing, because no one knows who you are in the real life. In addition, there is no due-day, or specific topic, learners can write whenever and whatever they like. They have much freedom.
This website is a non-profit language learning website, so all kinds of people can be members. People master in different languages can contribute their expertise to help different language learners. There is no practice or assessment. All you can do is post your journal articles and then people will give you feedbacks and help correct the grammatical errors. It is much like a self-service community. As a new member of this website, I will say it is a little difficult for me to get acquainted with the user interface. I think it will be better to categorize different language journals so that new users can choose the articles according to the different language catalogues.
Overall, it is a great website for learners who want to improve their writing skills.
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3 comments:
Hi, Theresa! What an interesting concept: A site created for the purpose of “studying language and to help advance international communication!” I can definitely understand the community component you talked about — a sort of ”learners helping learners” in which there are ground rules and the honor system for using the site. There’s a lot of trust being placed on members in terms of their writing skills. Hmm…I wonder how much time and energy active members of the site spend as “writing tutors?” I envision some members giving more than they are getting! :)
Like you, I also found the site a bit daunting at first glance. The diversity of languages presented on the site can be very distracting, especially since different alphabets (non-Romanized) are used. Talk about the Tower of Babel! Yet, the site seems popular so I suppose it just takes some time to get familiar with the user interface. Good luck!
Hi Theresa,
I am so glad you introduced me to this interesting website. Like Sio, I like the concept of international communnication and learenrs' community and I can picture learners enjoying meeting people from all over the world and using languages for genuine purposes.
I also agree with you that it's not very easy to navigate thw website and have a quick overview of the features. I woukd also like to learn more how to use this website...
hi, Sio:
Thank you for your comments! I agree with you that some members did contribute more than others. Maybe one year after, we can no longer see this website becuase fewer and fewer people using this website. Maybe just like Wikipedia, there are more and more enthusiastic people and make the website function better. No matter what, I believe the idea to create such a free space is really COOL.
:)
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