Upgrades to EF Englishtown—new features, to the school

(July 7, 2011) — Hong Kong, China. EF Englishtown, the world’s largest online English school, updates key learning tools and introduces new features to their courseware. Englishtown’s new activities make learning on the go more convenient than ever, provide unique social learning experiences, and offer enhanced features to improve user experience.

In this latest update, Englishtown’s courseware, Englishtown 10, has now been made available on the iPad, taking advantage of the iPad’s natural touch screen interaction and optimizing activity designs to make language learning an even more intuitive process. With learning more portable than ever, students will be able to study anywhere that has a wifi connection.

Englishtown’s new Text-To-Speech feature allows users to double click on any word within the learning material or highlight longer text and hear it spoken with a native English accent. Users will hear the correct pronunciation of individual words or whole paragraph and can use the feature to practice listening. Accompanied by translations, the feature makes it easy for users to quickly understand the meaning of any word at any given time.

The school’s new Learning Points feature will help students evaluate how well they’re performing amongst their peers and as a result, motivate them to study more. Additionally, this new feature awards users for completed activities and distributes bonuses for finishing unit, level, and various other milestones.

Englishtown has developed new social learning elements including a Student-To-Student Challenge feature that allows students to compete for additional Learning Points on an individual basis or in teams with other students. Incorporating the latest in game mechanics, user focus groups have responded positively to the challenges and progress tracking features, reporting that their studies are “more engaging and interactive.”

Additionally, the ever-popular Flashcard tool has been upgraded. With a new design, larger word pool, a new vocabulary progress report, and better integration with the notebook tool, students will be able to update and customize vocabulary lists and use the new progress section to track their progress in vocabulary acquisition. Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) has also been added to this feature for pronunciation purposes.

Lastly, Englishtown has incorporated additional improvements, including compatibility with Google’s Chrome web browser and a new feedback function to all activities, enabling users to contribute to the development process.

ABOUT EF ENGLISHTOWN
Originally conceived in collaboration with Apple, EF Englishtown is the world’s largest online English school. A division of EF Education First, EF Englishtown is trusted by over 1,200 leading global companies and has served as the Official Language Training Supplier to the Beijing 2008 Olympics, trained 60,000 volunteers, and will similarly help Russia in the 2014 Sochi Games and Brazil for the 2014 World Cup.

EF Englishtown and EF Language Learning Solutions is focused on helping people master English. Clients have included Google, IBM, DHL, and Rolls-Royce.

For a full client list, visit our website at www.englishtown.com. For updated information on our latest initiatives, please visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/efenglishtown or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/efenglishtown.

For media inquiries, please contact press@ef.com.

2301-08 Tower Two Times Square
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

This release was published on openPR.