I looked into this when I wanted to find the level of the ‘Britain is
GREAT’ series of videos and could find no guidance: this is poor from a teacher’s
point of view as well as from a student’s.
I decided to survey what levels most materials are at based
on the information here:
Level
|
Number of items
|
Percentage of total
|
A1
|
1
|
0.2 %
|
A2
|
9
|
2.1 %
|
B1
|
265
|
61.6 %
|
B2
|
136
|
31.6 %
|
C1
|
19
|
4.4 %
|
C2
|
0
|
0 %
|
Total
|
430
|
So basically, LearnEnglish caters for Intermediate/Upper
Intermediate students: 93.2%
This only covers 430 items (31.6 %), which are labelled for
a particular level; the other 931 items (68.4 %) are not labelled for a particular
level.
My conclusion is that I should recommend LearnEnglish to my
Intermediate group (B1) and an Upper
Intermediate group (B2) if I had one.
I accept that writing material for A1 is difficult and that
it is perhaps not necessary for C2 as students at this level should be able to
follow their interests on any website, but I’m disappointed that there is so
little for A2, particularly as I have a Pre-intermediate group.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the level of ‘Elementary
Podcasts’ and found that the vast majority are labelled B1; only 2 out of 40
were labelled A2 and the most recent series are not labelled for level.
Basically, LearnEnglish isn’t organised by levels, which I
think limits its usability by lower and higher level learners