ACTFL Exhibits; That’s Not Cheese; a Sympathetic Human Face

About 10 years ago, my Tagalog class went to tour an artisan cheese factory in rural Wisconsin. The cheesemaster was tall and thoughtful and fit the bill of enlightened gentleman farmer. His tour was thorough and painstaking as he explained the processes and details of getting their curds to the absolute summit of delicate cheese quality.

At the end of the hour our teacher cheerfully asked, “which of your cheeses can keep well without refrigeration for 6 months to a year?”

We never told her that she had missed the point entirely; the point is that she was straight from Manila and did not have any cultural or historic experiences to tell her that great natural, artisan cheese requires refrigeration. Why would she know that, if she had been eating processed cheese her entire life?

There’s no cheese like that, he said. You could make something that fits your requirements, but it misses the point. That’s not cheese.

I was at the ACTFL Conference last week, and besides the scholarly presentations, there is also the exhibit hall, where language learning product vendors were hawking their wares, giving demonstrations, and trying to raise the profile of their gear.

Just a review: the five skills of language learning are listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture. I endorse a product IF AND ONLY IF that product has you PHYSICALLY listening, speaking, reading, writing; all at the sentence level… and/or practicing cultural competency to some extent. I don’t endorse any memory recall training, and my stomach turns when I see unscrambling.

Here’s a few products I saw at the ACTFL 2012 Exhibition Hall:

Skritter

I’ve talked about Skritter before; here’s their website. It’s that program that reviews Chinese character stroke order, and provides both audio and visual. I use Skritter myself, and require it in my classrooms. I choose to review the characters by writing them with a stylus on my iPad. So when I use it, I’m physically writing characters.

I know, I know; it doesn’t meet my criteria of PHYSICALLY practicing any of the five skills at the sentence level; I am physically writing, but for now it’s only at the word and phrase level. There’s an argument to be made that learning characters and knowing their stroke orders is cultural competence.

But the reason I’m sold on Skritter is that I heard from them directly that the next thing they are going to work on are making the sample sentences useful (right now, they’re they’re mostly level-inappropriate, randomly-drawn from a corpus). If and when they make those sample sentences level-specific, Skritter has the potential to be a powerful reading and writing review tool.

Chinese Cubes

Huge waste of energy. Your webcam watches as you assemble simple sentences from pre-fab word cubes; on the screen some text bubbles pop up telling you what the database holds in terms of definitions and how they interact with other cubes.

You’re not physically listening for meaning, nor are you speaking, nor are you reading other than the sentences you’ve assembled. There’s a module that shows you some stroke order, but I fail to see how it’s dependent on the webcam or blocks. And culture… no.

Here’s the website, on it you can watch some of the marketing videos to see what I’m talking about.

This product is a dog. My friend was a little giddy about the cool physical interface, but in the end we were both embarrassed that the task of the product was putting some blocks in an order the computer was programmed to like.

Products like these are fast and loose with the words “teach” and “learn.” By “teach” what they really mean is “show you the answer to a question you didn’t ask.” By “learn,” what they really mean is “quiz.”

Notice also, that with this method there is no hope of any future human interaction. With Skritter, I might use the knowledge I physically practiced to write someone a letter; with ChineseCubes, I’d have to imagine a scenario where I communication by block-assembly was somehow acceptable.

By making a language-learning product which does not physically practice any of the four skills, they have missed the point of a language-learning product. It misses the point. That’s not cheese.

But JP, doesn’t assembling blocks show you how to create a well-formed sentence?

Sure! You know what else shows you how to create a well-formed sentence? Talking to a person. Talking to a person also has the added bonus of actually being the task you’re trying to learn. Next.

You know, come to think of it, assembling blocks in a proper order can also be applied to learning history (put these historical events in sequence!) or math class, or cooking, or getting your drivers’ license; any complex task that requires knowledge of a sequence. Do you see people falling all over themselves to teach drivers’ ed by coded block assembly?

No. Because it’s a bad idea. Next, I said!

FluentU

FluentU was known as FluentFlix a few days ago. Annotations have been around ever since languages had writing systems. What FluentU has managed to do is annotate video in a highly interactive way that’s intuitive and imminently helpful; yes original lessons, but mostly entertainment media meant for native speakers.

That sound you just heard was listening comprehension experts all simultaneously groaning in ecstasy. This product is basically ChinesePod, except remove the chatty linearity of the all-audio podcast, and add highly appropriate visual context… PLUS it’s real language media PLUS it’s ALREADY ENTERTAINMENT.

God help us, they’ve hit all the listening-comprehension buzzwords. And yes, listening comprehension input is still the major thing missing from language learning classrooms. Reading the highly interactive and customize-able subtitles translate to reading sentences in the real world. Listening to Chinese people talk to each other at real-world speed will translate to listening to Chinese people talk to each other in the real-world. Finally, somebody gets the point; they’re practicing the actual skills. They’re making cheese by actually making cheese.

The only criticism I have is that they are fast and loose with the word “learn;” they’d easily earn a lot of respect from the professional teaching community if they used that word less sloppily. Words like “practice, recall, review, interact with, master…” those go a lot farther among teachers than a claim that you can “learn business Chinese” with this product. You can definitely study business Chinese with this product as the main resource, but “learn” implies a level of mastery that will require the other skills, and a lot of practice, more than this product can provide.

In any case, the potential for FluentU is huge; they’ve already got 900 videos ready to study; we referred to them as an “ocean” of videos. If they and when they become successful it will be because they have kept improving the experience and got the marketing ball rolling. And I want to see them succeed. FluentU has great potential to help people actually improve their listening, reading, and vocabulary. Huge potential.

I told them for the marketing side, and for the user experience, their product still needs a human face. An ocean of 900 videos is daunting; people will latch on to the DJ or curator, or teacher, or whatever metaphor… anyone that can guide them through that ocean.

That’s probably the best advice I’ve ever given someone for free (not that they asked for it). There’s a fallacy among language learners, especially Chinese learners for some reason, that they need to study without humans until they’re good enough not to make fools of themselves; a fear-filled hypothesis. That’s totally wrong; they need sympathetic humans at every step.