Rudy Blok's EFL Study & Resource Site

for use by students learning English as a foreign language and by EFL teachers

Textual Exercises

Visual Tasks

Aural Practice

Contact Details

Background :

Whilst teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language), I became involved in a project to create a study resource CD-ROM for use by students in pursuing various state examinations in the English language. To design a series of EFL-based web-pages that were both informative, productive and fun seemed a logical extension. I was encouraged by a number of former students who nagged and nagged until finally, in January 1997, the first pages became available.

The material on these pages may be used as a resource by EFL Teachers and as an interactive medium for students. The whole Study Concept utilises e-mail, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the internet (through object-oriented web-browsing and contracted project work). I am currently re-developing a script for mIRC v5.11 that will allow students and teachers alike to gather on a regular basis and participate in regular IRC 'conferences' with greater ease. This combination of web page resource and IRC conferencing over the internet is currently limited but I hope to develop the idea further as soon as time, financing and space allow.

Soon after starting this project, it became clear that my web-resources were inadequate and the sheer size of the material produced has necessitated a monthly update procedure by which, unfortunately, previous month's pages are removed and replaced - I only have 10mb of web-space to play with, although it may be possible to increase this amount in the future. Previous pages are therefore available for download from the BlokEFL FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Server, which is online each weekend; in this way work need not be lost. As a (growing) resource for EFL teachers world-wide and a forum for self-study, I believe this to be the first independent online EFL study program available to utilise the web in conjunction with IRC and FTP. Other EFL-related sites are listed on the contacts page but if you know of another unlisted quality EFL resource page, please let me know and I will add a link.

Who is Rudy Blok? Tell me if you find out. :)

Enjoy your visit!

Kevin Allsopp

These pages are under heavy construction!

I would welcome any serious input and all constructive suggestions will be gratefully accepted and thoroughly cogitated upon. A lot. :)

Thanks

Many thanks to students old and new - Tibi and Tamás (the Terrible Marcinkovics Twins), Karnis Andrea and Horváth Balint, and to those Summer Course students who have expressed an interest - Jung Hee Bum, Sophia, Hai Yen and Patrice Wegener. Finally I would like to thank all those past students who continue to use these pages (and IRC) and those new students who have joined in since January. Without you, there would be no point. :)

Note : These pages in no way represent or infer a formal course of study per se. They are simply designed to assist self-motivated EFL students to improve and develop existing language skills whilst becoming increasingly familiar with computer-systems and skilful in navigating the vagaries of the world-wide-web. Teachers who wish to use these pages within the constraints of their own lesson-plans are more than welcome and I would greatly appreciate any feedback and/or suggestions.

This study suite (comprising mIRC v5.11, SerVU v2.3 and CuteFTP v2) is intended for use with the Windows95 operating system. With regard to Web-Browsing software, I would heartily recommend Microsoft's Internet Explorer v4- I realise that this view is 'against the grain' but I have tested Netscape Communicator v4.03 directly against MSIE v4 and for speed MSIE won hands down.

These pages were designed to be displayed in 1024 x 768 in 256 colours.

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since November 9th 1997