There happen to be many English teaching websites out there, some are for big franchise-based schools, others are for small private schools run by university lecturers or native English speaking professionals living abroad. You can quickly tell the difference between the organized franchises and the individual entrepreneurs from varying factors including the existence of a central website within which all subsidiary schools appear as subdirectories, school@big-school-brand-here emails and, of course, on-line level tests on one side, and the traditional one-page-three-links information thing, sometimes even on a free hosting service, on the other (If you can't design decent HTML why bother with expensive hosting and domain names right? I fully agree...)

This does not mean that the private entrepreneurs offer a lower level of teaching compared to the big, organized and shiny-websited groups. In fact, sometimes the poor entrepreneurs simply give up and join in, paying a substantial yearly fee to get logo, merchandise and flashy website subdirectory, and lose their identity. So in the end the quality is exactly the same, and here in Italy the public is slowly becoming aware of this, more and more people will ask for the teachers' qualifications, experience and native language before agreeing to sign up for a course.

The basic problem lies in the fact that languages and science are kept well separate in all universities, so that those graduating in one will have serious problems with the other. Go to a techie website blog or forum and start counting all the spelling mistakes. Or go into a room full of English teachers and ask them if they're running .NET 2.0 in their IIS and enjoy the awkward silence and puzzled stares. This separation is, all things considered, probably a good idea, since mixing up language and literature notions with structured coding and IT would probably result in very confused students.

I happen to have gone through language and literature in my studies, while pursuing programming and computers as a hobby and I know I'm confused... Yet when I finally started my own English language school (Yes, I also happen to be a native English speaker living in Italy) and started preparing my own website: www.activeenglish.it it didn't look like such an impossible task. I surely wasn't going to join up with any franchise. All I needed to make my website as good as theirs now was an English level test the visitors could fill in and submit via e-mail. I now have to admit this was not an easy task as I initially believed (must be my linguistic side interfering). After hunting down tutorials from many techie sites, covering my face at the hideous spelling horrors therein, I finally chose to create the online test using javascript, which is a way to write some interactivity instructions right along with the static HTML of a page, with javascript you can, for example, instruct the visitor's browser to evaluate the information in a form before submitting it. So in my case, I placed my test in a web form, and wrote the code necessary to compare the selected answers with the correct ones and print out a message with the resulting score. Of course the result was full of bugs and I had to spend hours debugging (my non-techie side again), but in the end I obtained this page with which I'm fairly satisfied.

This article was not written to discourage other English teachers like me facing the same problem, for here is the good news: I did it the hard way. Knowing I had the necessary ability, I coded everything by myself, but while browsing around for tutorials and information I ran across many websites offering testing systems and even hosted tests (you configure the questions on a remote website and send visitors to their link, where your test will be hosted) some free, some requiring a small fee (the former probably don'thave support for installation and such, of course)

So my suggestion is: search the Internet for "online test system", "online test javascript" and "online quizzes", choose your solution...

...and don't look at the spelling mistakes...