How To Use a WhatsApp Group To Learn English

If you are an English as an additional language learner, you like chatting with your friends and want to use your time proactively on a WhatsApp group to learn English, follow the tips below and start doing that right now. Stop wasting your time on social media. Use it to your benefit!

The first step to create a WhatsApp group to learn English

The first thing you need to do is to find a group of people who share the same objective as you: learning English or developing their existing knowledge of this language.

Once you have some friends interested in taking part in this activity, you need to create a group on the messaging app you chose and add every person that you gathered. The number can be as small as two people or as big as ten, or twenty friends.

However, I wouldn’t advise an extremely large number of people to have certain control over the participants. For example, everyone involved in the process must participate actively. Otherwise, you’ll only have a bunch of people who do not give any contribution to the process and, in fact, discourage other participants to engage in the activities.

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Rules are necessary

For the project to work, you will need to talk to the other members and establish some rules, otherwise, you will not use a WhatsApp group to learn English but to chat aimlessly. Of course, the rules are not meant to be boring and prevent people from taking part in the discussions. On the contrary, they need to be stated to make people interact with each other.

The first rule that you need to create is related to how discussions in the group are going to be guided. For example, you could state that people are going to talk to each other freely about their everyday life, which I do not recommend. Why? Because, in my experience, “discussions” will be reduced to “Hi. How are you?”, “Hey. I’m ok. What about you?”, “I’m fine”. That’s all. It’s not difficult to understand that no one will benefit from it.

Instead, you could establish, for example, some days in which you’re going to discuss a specific topic. Global warming, for example. You can share articles and videos about it and then discuss the topic with the other members. Once the topic is fully discussed, and everyone has expressed their opinion about it, you change it to the next one.

This way, you’ll not only develop your English but also learn about different things that are important in our life.

Another rule that you need to establish is how you are going to communicate with one another. Only by text messages? Only by voice messages? Both? Of course, it depends on the objectives of the group as a whole.

Do you want to focus on writing and reading, speaking and listening, or all of them?

I’d say it’s interesting to focus on all of these abilities if you want to develop your language skills as a whole. But again, it depends on your goals.

If you choose all of them, then you could specify it a little bit more: you’ll write a text message and the next one must be a voice message, or one day you only write and read, and the next day you only speak and listen? Decide what will work best for you.

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It’s a community

It means that every member is essential for constructing the interaction.

Furthermore, each member will be extremely important for the development of the whole group. Why? Because the members will not only learn from others, they will also teach them.

Let’s say we are discussing some international news of the week. My friends are expressing their opinion but I constantly see that one of them is committing some mistakes while using a specific structure, a verb form, for example. If I can identify the mistake, it means that I know the structure and what the correct form is. As a member of a community, I must share my knowledge so others can learn from it. And vice-versa.

When you find a situation in which you have no answers and neither do your friends, let’s say, about the use of conditionals in English, it’s time for you all to Google it and share your findings with the group.

You can find plenty of materials about English on the internet. Blogs and YouTube are two of the most useful resources for learning grammar, for example.

Once you all find some useful materials and share them with the group, the others will be able to access them and learn from them too. In this process, you are expected to help each other and learn the content together.

Self-assessment is essential

Once a week is a good frequency for you to talk about what has been happening in the group. Use Sundays, for example, to assess the work done in the previous week.

Consider everything: your participation, if you have read or watched the materials sent by your friends in the group, if you have helped your friends understand something that they have had difficulty with, etc.

It’s also important to reflect upon what you know now that you didn’t know before. Think about types of texts, topics, vocabulary, grammar, expressions, etc.

After considering everything, do not forget to think about how you can maximize it for the next week. Think about things you think you could improve and set some goals for the next few days.

This activity should also be done with your friends in the group. This way, you can help each other not only in your self-assessment but also in creating new ways to improve your participation and development.

Benefits of using a WhatsApp group to learn English

Well, first of all, it’s handy! You can develop your English on the go; anytime, anywhere.

Secondly, if you join a group of people you already know, you’ll feel more comfortable talking to them in the language you are learning without being afraid of commenting mistakes.

Also, you can use both voice and text messages. When you text your friends, you will have time to think before sending them what you have written.

You can also benefit from the autocorrect function of the keyboard on your smartphone: you will be corrected every time you misspell something.

Last, but not least, you can also video call other members to talk to them just like you would do face to face!

Go for it: enjoy your WhatsApp group to learn English

Now that you have read the entire article on how to use a WhatsApp group to learn English (or a group on WeChat, Telegram, or any other messaging app), you must get to work!

Take some minutes to start organizing your group right now. Don’t wait. Do it now or you might never do it.

Start your experience, and don’t forget to tell us in the comments section below how your experience has been!