Academic Progress through the Community Feature of Online English Learning Website

With the spreading of the internet, the concept of “e-learning”, or online learning has come under intense scrutiny by researchers and educators withn the recent years. The ease of accessibility, however, has the demerits of causing such learning via mobile devices and PCs to become downgraded in the users' eyes, ultimately learding to a lack of usage among learners. In order to counteract this, the use of communities based on social networking services (much like Facebook) among Japanese learners is explored in this study. The original pilot study focused on Japanese English as a Foreign Language learners who used a social network in order to read daily posts concerning English studies and foreign cultures. The results indicated that while the participants enjoyer the content found withn the community, there were issues with being able access the website and unfamiliarity with the technology that was being used. As a result, there is a current study being carried out with the same social network that endeavors to cover the weaknesses in the structure of the pilot study