Announcing English Writing Practice via Twitter

What’s Twitter you ask? Twitter is a tool that you can use to send messages of up to 140 characters to a group of followers while you also follow others. To understand, here is a video called Twitter in Plain English which provides a good introduction:

This is a great tool that works with any device that you use to connect to the Internet. The messages are short, and easy to read. It’s the perfect platform to practice English idioms! The idea works like this:

• Sign up for a free Twitter account
• Once you’ve signed up, log in to your account. You can add a background, a picture of yourself and a short biography if you want.
• Navigate to the Englishfeed Twitter Page and click on “Follow” which you’ll see on the left hand side of the page
• Begin receiving the updates on what we’re working on that day, respond by writing an example using the grammar, idiom or structure of the day.
• You can participate as much as you want. Here’s a little explanation:

  You can sign up to only follow Englishfeed at Twitter - which means you’ll get only what I post to the service. You’ll get a notification of the grammar, idiom or structure of the day, some of my examples, and perhaps a few really good examples that I choose during the day. These will arrive as they are added to the service, so you’ll be getting short 30 second English practice sessions throughout the day. If you want to see more, you can go to http://twitter.com/englishfeed to see the replies coming in.

  You can also sign up to follow other followers of the site by clicking on “followers” on the right hand side of the page. By doing this, you’ll receive other people’s examples automatically - a great way to improve your understanding of the target English of the day, and make new friends around the world!

• When you sign up to follow Englishfeed on Twitter, I’ll sign up to follow you as soon as I can.

The main idea is to learn new vocabulary and practice your writing through participation. It won’t take much time because you’ll just have 140 characters to practice with. You’ll get updates during the day if you follow people with other examples you can learn from. Of course, you can see all the updates at http://twitter.com/englishfeed. You can also use your cell phone, iPhone or other Internet accessing device to participate.

The main thing is you’ll be getting English practice done everyday!

NOTE:

I won’t be correcting all the mistakes on this service. There’s no way I could do that as the number of participants grows. It’s a service to give you the opportunity to practice. I will certainly point out good examples of the structure, and make comments from time to time. I’ll also be posting updates to http://esl.about.com and http://englishfeed.com as new study materials are added to the sites.

This is experimental, but that’s the fun!

You can see the latest Twitter posts on the right hand side under “Englishfeed”