TopTenREVIEWS

By Wanda Richards

English Maze appears to be a work in progress at this point in time. We are very impressed with some of their goals, though. They have a very good placement test that wasn’t all grammar-based, so they clearly know something about language instruction.

We were frustrated by the fact that their audio files were so hard to understand. This clearly has to do with the quality of microphone that was used. And the website itself seemed to stress the bells and whistles of their technology rather than the product they’re trying to sell. We advise them to take away all of the moving boxes and such and just use plain simple text links. They should also use a larger font on their website; we had to squint to be able to read it.

English Maze Screenshots

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Social Media:

But don’t get the wrong idea. English Maze has its good qualities. For example, they have one of the best forums we’ve seen. They have good topics, and they have a moderator present to assure that the discussions stay on topic. It’s truly an informative and well-thought out forum.

They also have something called e-pals where you can communicate via e-mail with a friend. This is a great feature. In addition, they have a chat, but unfortunately it’s not ready yet. We look forward to checking this out when it’s ready.

Quality of Instruction:

Unfortunately we just didn’t care for much of what English Maze is currently stressing. Many of their lessons are dedicated to topics such as listening to speakers and trying to figure out which of the speakers is Canadian and which is American. Most Canadians and Americans can’t even tell. And most of all, we wonder why this is important at all.

There are even lessons devoted to recognizing the accents of non-native speakers where students try to figure out whether the speaker is originally from France or Indonesia. We ask: How will this help someone who is trying to learn English?

One thing we did like though is their “Expression of the Day” where you can have new words e-mailed to you every day.

Variety of Offerings:

English Maze has a general English course study and a business English course of study. We liked their practicality on these lessons because they walk students through checking telephone messages and writing a resume.

Instructional Options:

English Maze didn’t offer a lot of instructional options unfortunately, but maybe as they grow they’ll start to offer more. We did see that they have lots of free tips on English and they even give away a free vocabulary book just for signing up.

Summary:

English Maze would be much more impressive if they would stop using all of the fancy shmancy interactivity and just put up a plain simple website. In addition, they need to change their focus away from the accent recognition lessons.

We look forward to them making these changes, but for now we suggest you learn English with English4today, English, baby!, or Livemocha.