Lesson System

Our system is simple. We teach English on Skype.

This is the basic flow:

  1. You book a lesson and pay online using this site.
  2. Then you connect with your teacher on Skype and take your lesson.
  3. After the lesson, you will get a lesson report, including all the new words and phrases we covered in class, plus some extra advice and feedback.

Before you use The English Farm, please take a look at our start guide. It tells you about setting up Skype, getting more information about our system and taking a free trial class to get an English skills assessment.

Booking lessons

You can book lessons on our website by yourself. You can choose your teacher and lesson time. There are lessons available any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Because we have teachers around the world, we never close.

Each lesson is 25 minutes. Lessons start on the hour and half hour, with five-minute breaks in between. You can cancel or change your booking online too. If you need to cancel your lesson or change the lesson time, as long as you do it more than 12 hours before the lesson starts, you won’t lose your lesson point. You can book a class anytime from 180 days to thirty minutes in advance.

Taking classes

After you book a lesson, it will be confirmed by email. You will also get a reminder email before your lesson. Just before your lesson, make sure you are logged on to Skype. When it is time to start, your teacher will send you a chat message on Skype to see if you are ready.

In your lessons, you can choose to study one of our courses, or you can make a special request of your teacher if you need to. You are the boss and we will do our best to do what you request. There are also guided conversation classes on interesting topics for you to learn from. These are updated often, so you can learn to talk about current topics.

During the lesson, your teacher will write notes in Skype chat for you. Skype saves these notes automatically and so you can look at them later. Your teacher will also write these notes into your lesson report, which you can see on our website.

After your lesson, on your homepage on this site you can see the list of new phrases and words from the lesson, as well as some feedback from the teacher to help you improve.

You are also welcome to give some feedback on the lesson. You can do that on the lesson report. You can also comment on the lesson report and follow up with your teacher if you need  to.

Lesson content

To learn most efficiently, every student on The English Farm should choose a textbook. We will recommend a textbook for you from our textbook library based on your needs and goals. There are lots of courses to choose from.

We also create our own lessons based on interesting conversation topics. These lessons are all free and on our site. They are conversation lessons and are designed to help you learn to discuss various issues. You can choose to study one of these lessons at any time to give you a break from your textbook. We are always publishing new lessons, so you can choose fresh, up-to-date lesson content.

You may study more than one textbook at a time, if you wish (for example, pronunciation and business English). You can also choose not to use a book and have free conversation classes if you would like. Just let us know.

Paying for your class

When you book a lesson, you can pay every time you take your lesson, or you can buy a lesson package for a discount. Check our lesson prices here. You can talk to us if you need some advice.

Please pay for your lessons using Paypal. With Paypal you can use a credit card to pay for the lessons you take on The English Farm. For your security, you will never have to give your credit card number to us. It is a fast, convenient and very safe way to pay online.

The first time you use Paypal, you will need to create a Paypal account. After that paying for lessons is smooth and easy. You won’t need to enter your details every time you buy a lesson. All you need to do is enter your email address and password.