Englishbaby.com joins China’s Olympic conversation

Portland language Web site heads to the Olympic games with an eye on teaching tools

By Mariah Summers

The Portland Tribune, Jul 8, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

A Portland English language instruction and social networking Web site will send representatives to the Olympics in Beijing next month.

Four members of Englishbaby.com’s administrative team are headed to Beijing for one week to film videos of local Chinese culture and activities during the Olympics that will be broadcast online.

“A lot of the personal connections made at the games will be enabled by the presence of a common language: English,” said John Hayden, the site’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We want to send the message that this event is bringing the world together, and we want want people who can’t be there to share the experience of building a global community.”

Hayden and co-founder Miguel McKelvey started Englishbaby.com in 2000 to help people in Portland and around the world learn English for free. The site is translated into four languages to reach a growing number of people learning the language.

“We focus on English because of the demand for the language,” Hayden said. “There are currently about 1.5 billion people learning English around the world.”

Today, with more than 800,000 members representing every country, the site primarily tries to bring cultural context to its members’ English studies.

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