English Central

What is English Central?

English Central is a website that help people to learn English by watching videos. It is perfect for students to practice speaking and pronunciation as well as vocabulary. Most of the videos are authentic materials, ranging from famous speeches to popular TV serious. It offers different categories to meet all kinds of students' needs, including academic English, business English, media English, social English, travel English and even English for young learners.

Click here to check out my introduction of English Central's homepage.

How to use English Central?

This is an official tutorial video on how to use English Central to 'speak a video', and to learn vocabulary.

What are the strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths

• It is the so far the best website (I have ever seen) to help English learners with their pronunciation.
• And it is FREE!
• It automatically analyzes your pronunciation and then tells you your problems in RED subtitles.
• There are plenty of videos to choose from for learners of different purposes, ranging from videos for younger learners to business English, from famous speeches to updated movie clips. Learners could choose the video according to their own preference. Therefore, they are likely to be more motivated.
• It also classifies videos according to the learners' level of difficulty, so that learners can choose videos according to their own proficiency.
• Some of the videos, especially those for higher proficiency students, are authentic materials, which are closely related to their real life topics.
• Besides practicing oral English, students could also learn some new vocabulary.
• Some videos, especially famous speeches or TED talks, are beneficial to learners in a much broader sense. The ideas and knowledge in the videos can be very helpful to learners in many aspects other than English.
• It is likely to enhance learners' motivation and autonomy.

Weakness

• It requires relatively fast internet speed and good computer system. Sometimes it doesn't work smoothly since it contains video playing and audio recording and pronunciation analyzing at the same time. It takes time especially when it analyzes your recordings. So just be patient and don't press any other buttons before it finishes the analyzing process.
• There are still some technical problems when analyzing recordings. Sometimes when we speak fast, it can not distinguish words that are pronounced together without obvious pauses.
• In order to get a good recording for analyzing your pronunciation, you do need to have a good earphone and microphone connected to your computer.