Facebook Groups for learning English are popular – but are they any good?

It’s been said that you can’t argue with popularity. If that’s true then Facebook Groups for learning English must be amazing! Right?

Open your Facebook page, run a search on ‘learn English’ in Groups, and you’ll be met with literally hundreds of groups located all over the world. Whilst the membership numbers vary, there are a large number with memberships of tens – sometimes hundreds – of thousands.

So the general idea is popular. But are they any good?

I joined about ten of the most popular groups and browsed through them for a few days. Here’s what I found:

1. Many (probably most) groups were hosted by non-native speakers. (Not a problem in itself, but see point 2 below).
2. Many (probably most) groups were hosted by people who do not seem to be properly qualified English teachers.
3. Many (probably most) contained basic English grammar mistakes, not only in their posts but also in their banner details and group descriptions.
4. Most groups offered uninspiring posts which were either a series of one-off grammar points (usually a fill-in-the-gap quiz, copied from another source) or promotions for their online lessons.
5. Many posts were randomly offered, with no continuity or structure to the learning.
6. Many (probably most) groups did not target a particular level (e.g. beginners, intermediate) – it was a general free-for-all!
7. Although many goups posted frequently – sometimes more than once a day – there would be very few responses in the comments or likes. If a group has 10k+ members, why do only 10-20 seem to be regularly engaging?
8. Some of the groups wouldn’t let me post, which would have been good if I intended to post spam but not so good in this case since I was trying to offer constructive content from the perspective of a qualified, experienced English teacher.
9. All of the groups accepted my application to join. Only a couple asked me any qualifying questions, the rest were happy to accept anyone.
10. Many groups offered free downloads of PDFs of published books. Whilst this is a convenient resource for learners on a low budget, it is a breach of copyright and unfair on the authors of those books. I appreciate that in the world of internet learning there is an expectation that everything should be free, but it’s the right of the authors to give this permission, not Facebook group hosts!

Coming back to my initial question – is learning English from Facebook Groups any good?

The main two positives are the obvious ones:

1 It’s free, and

2 it’s convenient.

Beyond that, I’d say that with no structure to the learning, little quality control, and no real focus it’s highly unlikely that you’ll make fast progress if Facebook Groups are your only strategy for learning English.

If you use Facebook Groups successfully – or you run a group which is different to the ones I describe – please feel free to get in touch. I’d be happy to amend this article and give it a more positive spin if the evidence is there to let me do so.

Featured image photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash