Students: Try the Real English LESSONS / Teachers: Please explain to your students!

I just visited Google Analytics for the very first time, and I was happily surprised to see that total unique visits to the Real English site have increased by 200% during the last 30 days. Maybe it’s because I have been doing online  presentations about the site. Maybe it’s because David has generously helped me create some buzz about Real English on his popular site the EFL 2.0 Classroom. Or maybe it’s because I’ve recently begun using the English Star player, with a choice of subtitles in English, French, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, finally enabling me to begin attracting a few visitors from those Asian countries.  Probably a combination of such things.

I was intrigued, so I looked deeper: only  4% of the visitors are doing the Real English Lessons, while 27% of visitors come to this old wordpress blog, which I don’t even update regularly!

This is crazy. The best thing about the RE site is that students can actually learn English with a minimum of motivation. I spend almost all my time improving the lessons, and improving the videos for the lessons, to capture students’ interest, increase their motivation (I hope), encouraging them to get to work. But most students only look at the index type pages with videos, apparently, and go no further.

Excuse the tired adjective, but it really is fun to learn English on the RE site.

Here is a 3-step procedure I recommend, and it’s really simple:

1 – When you arrive at the Real English site, click on the “New Lessons” link.  There’s a really big one in the upper right corner.

2 – From this “New Lessons” page, choose ANY lesson you like.

3 – You arrive at a Lesson index page, for example lesson 29 home. Click on  “Exercise 1″ or the picture under “Exercise 1″, or even the Real English logo on the left. Any of these links will bring you to Exercise 1 where the fun begins.