Behind the Scenes of Engramo, Pt. 3
Engramo English is a mobile learning app. It’s the smart solution for the English learner of the 21st century. You download it, open it, and it does its job — it teaches you English. But how does it actually work? What is hidden behind that nice & clean Dashboard?
Coverage Strategy
In order to deliver the best possible learning experience, app creators have to consider how best to approach every piece of the subject. Engramo already has an advantage in this regard thanks to the groundwork laid down by the Knowledge Bits subdivision of the grammar. I’m sure you would agree that the next step is to take the Knowledge Bits one by one and decide on strategies for best practice, right? So, that’s exactly what we did. It took some time and some serious effort, but we devised a strategy for every Bit. We focused on the types of exercises that best underpin the point of each rule as well as on what other rules are relevant. This means that Engramo users will typically practise several related Knowledge Bits together or back to back to consciously learn their differences and subconsciously associate them with the different contexts through repeated exposure.
An example of the kind of consideration we make is the following: In English, most magazines are used without an article (this linguistic device is sometimes called the zero article), as opposed to newspapers, which are referred to with the definite article, ‘the’. It’s common sense that this Bit cannot be practised with Word Formation exercises, where students are given a word in its base form and asked to modify it so that it fits, e.g. ‘do’ to ‘done’. We can use Fill-in exercises, where there is a gap for a word to be filled, but only if we make the “no answer required” switch available because it doesn’t make sense to fill in nothing. In this case, the exercise is still educational as it makes the student question whether it would be possible to use the definite or indefinite article. Multiple Choice exercises work for most grammar rules (which is why a lot of learning apps use exclusively or almost exclusively these sort of exercises), but they’re also quite easy and basic most of the time and mostly practise the student’s passive knowledge, so it becomes next to useless after the student has mastered the rule passively but still struggles with active use. This can be remedied with Error Correction, where the student is asked to find and correct the mistake in a sentence. And finally, it’s also a good idea to contrast the rule against another, similar one, which is why students will encounter this rule in Set Choice exercises along with the aforementioned newspaper-definite article rule, among others, so that they know they should say that you “read Vogue” but “buy The Times”.
