Kim Ngọc – English Teacher Training Student

WELE: Thank you, Ngoc, for agreeing to this interview with the program. What year and major are you currently in?

Ngoc: Right now I'm a K18 student majoring in English Pedagogy (I'm a final-year student).

WELE: What differences do you see between the WELE program and other online English programs you've taken part in?

Ngoc: I find WELE really optimizes the user's experience. I'm extremely impressed by the shortcuts. Because in reality, when doing dictation, the listener has to stop, rewind and fast-forward a lot, but if you only scrub along the audio bar it's really tedious and hard to hit the exact point you want to listen to. Another thing I really, really like is that WELE shows the percentage of correct words up front, which is very useful for me because I can tell my submission still has mistakes and narrow down where to fix them. Lastly, there's the save progress feature — whenever I come back to an unfinished exercise, I don't have to start over from the beginning; I can just continue from where I left off.

WELE: Did you have any difficulties listening to the lessons when you first started? How did WELE help you?

Ngoc: The difficulty I ran into with listening was that I couldn't accurately guess how proper names were spelled, or there were words that sounded similar to each other that I didn't notice carefully, so I often got them wrong even though they were very familiar words. After doing dictation on a few lessons, I recognized that about myself.

WELE: Do you have any message for other students?

Ngoc: You should, and really should, use WELE if you want to level up your listening. I'm living proof of how the dictation method can boost your band score dramatically — from someone who couldn't understand anything to someone who can now listen and understand 80-85% of what the audio says. Before, when I didn't know about WELE yet, writing things down on paper was pretty tough, because sometimes I'd miss a word without even realizing it, or I'd have to manually rewind the audio by hand, which took a lot of time. Now that WELE exists, make the most of it and "grind" WELE hard! ^^