Conclusions and Implications

I began looking at this site out of frustration: I can find academic articles all day long, but trying to actually discover a community online that was (a)generating conversation, (b)generating conversation on something that would interest me enough to follow it for several months and possibly participate, and (c) was still going strong does not seem to be my strong suit. After hours of staring at the screen, trying countless searches on my own affinities, www.how-to-learn-any-language.com (HTLAL) showed up like a light at the end of an interminably long tunnel. The site itself seemed a little strangely put together, and I had no idea what I could write about, but I was hooked.

I am glad that I stayed.  HTLAL is a robust forum, with hundreds of users posting every day about a multitude of topics relating to one of my favorite things: language! While a tiny minority of users post badly-thought-out, rude, or simply incomprehensible comments, the majority of the community seems interested in carrying out a serious, thoughtful inquiry into the nature of language and how (and why) to learn it. These individuals have come together from their various geographical locations because of (or perhaps in spite of) one man, a shady Swiss entrepreneur who created a curious but inspirational website with a well-designed forum and then disappeared, allowing his followers to discover their own best practices on these forums. The forum is an excellent case study for affinity groups - one that I would love to continue looking into beyond this semester. Near the end of my research, I discovered the newly-emerging practice of replacing language teachers with self-access language learning centers, and I did not have enough time to look into them as in-depth as I would have liked. What I did find, however, was that implementing a site such as HTLAL into an existing self-access language learning center, or vice versa, seems to be a good step to take in the future of online language learning. I hope to further research and confirm this implication in the months to come.

Website Architecture

After working with the forum side of this site for several weeks, I realized that I had not come in through the main page at all during that time. Though this is not necessarily strange - after all, I was more interested in the interactive, ever-changing nature of the forums than the static nature of the website itself, I decided to go back to the main page to see if there was anything I had missed that would further illuminate my observations on the forum. It seems that it was worth investigating - instead of finding more valuable information on that side (which I did as well), it was what I did not find that was more interesting.

 

   To the left is a screenshot the home page - note the main navigation bar (the four buttons in the black header space) does not have a link back to this page – most sections have a link in the sub-navigation bar, but once you click on Forum, for example, you have to re-enter the homepage address into the browser to return.

 

At the end of the welcome message here, there is an update announcing the number of members of the website, as well as new moderators and a post count. The date of this update, however, is the same as the copyright at the bottom of the page: 2009 (Oddly, the forum is copyrighted through this year, but this side was neglected.). There are a couple of other signs of neglect, such as the success story page, where Micheloud encourages his followers to submit their stories - but only one other than his own is displayed. Either Micheloud is very picky, or they just aren’t contributing that much because there is very little user-generated content on this side. After seeing a thread on the forum side suggesting that even the forum users didn't know what happened to him, I did a Google search to find if he was simply too busy being successful elsewhere to keep up on his site. Other than discovering that he is in the Swiss banking business and has several other websites that don't seem to have been updated since 2009, there is no news of his doings. It was suggested that I find out whether he even owned HTLAL anymore - and he does not. Fabien Snauwaert, a Frenchman who owns a website about learning English and has published a book on that topic, seems to be the sole contact for HTLAL. He does not show up anywhere on the site, and if he is a contributor to the forums, he uses another name; this does not help my opinion of the safety of this website.

The Guide section has a lot of great, general information, again generated pretty much solely by Micheloud. He includes tips and tricks on the learning process, a list (in English) of the most important phrases to learn in another language, and a full e-book about Mezzofanti, a famous polyglot. The offerings are a bit esoteric, but nothing too out of the ordinary. It is clear when Micheloud uses phrases such as, "there's no rule written on a stone" that English isn't quite his first language, but he is clear enough to be well-understood.

Though Micheloud does not actually include much learning material on his site, he does include a profile for 21 language, ranking them by popularity, difficulty, transparency, GDP, income, number of speakers, and number of countries it is spoken in. They are ordered by popularity, which does not seem to directly correlate with any of the other statistics, but instead is based on his visitations to shops that sell foreign-language materials. This seems like a very loose guideline, and many people seem to have written in regarding their own opinions on where their language should be ranked, but the information is interesting, nonetheless.

The pictures on the far right side of the page are placed directly where and in the same format that one would expect advertisements to be. As such, I hardly paid any attention to them for several visits. When I looked closer, however, I found links to other sections on the web page. I still have not clicked on them, out of confusion and fear that they still may be spam, but they seem to be legitimate. 

Compared to the forum side of the webpage, this website looks a bit trashy and very suspicious. If I hadn't discovered the robust nature of the forum side first, I probably would have left - too much of it looks like what I would consider spam.