Scaling English-Language Learning to 2 Billion People
“English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide — that’s one in every four. By 2020, we forecast that two billion people will be using it — or learning to use it.”
The English Effect — The British Council
Assuming that there are around 500 million native-English speakers in the world, that still leaves 1.5 billion people that will need to learn English or improve their existing ability. Since learning a language is a long-term commitment, many students fail because they are unable to maintain their commitment levels or cannot afford expensive classes. The fact is technology needs to be a big part of the solution or the vast majority of these students will fail to reach their study goals.
Some students go with classroom-based methods (which can be comprehensive), but often struggle with motivation and affordability over the long-term. Some try foreign-language media (YouTube, textbooks, etc.) which is good for getting exposure to the language, but does not allow the student to interact and produce the language. Still others try a variety of tools or games, but often learn new language out-of-context which makes retaining this knowledge very difficult.
The key challenge is how do you scale what happens in a classroom, but deliver it in a convenient, personalized fashion at an affordable price?
After more than a decade in this industry, most innovation I have seen comes from coders (usually with a gaming background) since teachers typically lack the necessary development skills. While these initiatives leverage the affordances of the new technology, they usually ignore the basic principles of modern language teaching (e.g. communicative language teaching, the lexical approach, etc.). Some have carved out a nice niche, but to date, nothing has emerged as an affordable and realistic alternative to classroom-based learning.
Designing a Solution
Our design approach was to break down the activities and benefits of a traditional classroom and find ways to re-construct this value in a more scalable fashion.
Our first attempt was to design a chat bot using interactive branching accompanied by automatic replies. The prompt-response nature of bots is very effective in language instruction as it effectively engages the student. However, we quickly saw this bot-only approach fail because it did not narrow the context of potential interactions the student could have with the bot and therefore conversations often went awry.
Our second attempt was to narrow the context with an audio file of a real-life dialogue at the beginning of the lesson interaction (much like you would hear at the beginning of an offline class) and then use the bot to provide practice and feedback. While this approach resulted in significantly more engagement, retention wasn’t very good. Curious students were willing to play around with a lesson, but they felt little need to come back.
Our third attempt added a social layer (FB Messenger rooms) as a place to introduce lessons, discuss questions and build a cohort of like-minded students. The assumption here was that communication is not just about transmitting information, it is also about satisfying emotional needs. It is early days, but we have seen an improvement in student motivation and retention.
Practice Speaking Everyday English
One big value of a classroom is the presence of a teacher who provides speaking practice and feedback. By enabling voice input while studying a lesson, students can now practice their English speaking skills and get feedback much like they would in a private one-on-one class. The system is designed to be ‘trained’ and will provide better and better feedback as more students use the platform.
While the experience is not as seamless as we would like yet, it is scalable and thousands of dollars cheaper than existing solutions. Chat bots, natural language processing and voice-first interfaces still have usability issues, but Real Deal English is demonstrating they are beginning to be ‘good enough’ to start delivering convenient and affordable English-language learning to 2 billion people.
You can find Real Deal English on Facebook Messenger:
https://m.me/realdealenglish
