For some reason or other, the Real English® Facebook page has gone slightly viral, with an average of 9,000 new likes per day over the past 6 weeks. It's a high quality page (he said modestly), but I have noticed that there are also mediocre ESL pages which suddenly go viral - with many more new likes per day than my own. I would google the phenomenon, but it would take too much time. Moreover, the title of this post is based upon the need to manage time more effectively. When I noticed an increase in traffic on my main site a few weeks ago, I noticed that this increase always took place the day after posting a few choice tidbits, including original quizzes and other interactive activities on the FB page, so I began to take Facebook more seriously. And then the problems began. I was suddenly spending many hours on the FB page, and didn't even find time to edit my new cool video footage to make new clips and then new lessons. The time was spent wisely on the FB page only in the sense that I was giving personal attention to almost every member who had a request, i.e. they loved the personal attention. But from the point of view of time management, it had become disastrous. Disastrous in the sense that hundreds of students were asking me questions which showed that they didn't have a clue about helping themselves to the free information available on the web.
I was stunned at first. I thought that the kids knew how to use the web better than old guys like myself. In any case, I changed my strategy, simply by giving the following type of advice to students who ask for specific info. In this case, the definition of a simple word:
"Hello ____ , it would be a very good idea to learn how to use online dictionaries. First of all, to get useful results more quickly, students of English should use the ENGLISH GOOGLE search site at: https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en For definitions, type "free dictionary" in the search box. Look at the results. You must choose the first result at the top: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ Then type [the word you are looking for]".
Despite the relatively natural language of my replies, students understand the written word much more easily than the spoken (of course!), and are able to find what they are looking for on their own. I now have 6 models of replies which I copy and paste, covering about 80% of requests for different types of information, and only have to write truly personalized replies to approximately 20% of the students who contact me on Facebook. Today I was able to take care of all the FB business in only one hour, leaving me free to continue video editing for the rest of the day. I honestly don't know if this is all terribly obvious to all online teachers, or if someone might benefit from my observations and new practices.
What Is Real English®? How Does It Work? How Is It Created?
Real English® isthe organization and exploitation of spontaneous speech for learning English as a second or foreign language. It has existed in the form of CD-ROMs and is currently available in the form of DVDs with workbooks & an instructor's guide and most notably, two web sites: our traditional site and a new mobile site for all smartphones and tablets.
The natural and unrehearsed language is collected in the form of filmed street interviews. We have so far filmed in 5 countries were English is spoken as a native language, especially the US and UK.
Students who take the necessary time (5 to 10 minutes) to discover how the Real English learning site works, tend to come back regularly. It is not a site for truly advanced students who already have extensive experience interacting with native speakers of English. In fact, Real English prepares beginners and intermediate students for the exact same experience.
The videos are engaging on a personal level which is difficult to explain. Learners seem to enter into the interviewees' personalities and experience their feelings. This might be due, in part, to the fact that we are very selective about which interviewees are chosen for the final edits which are used for the lessons.
The exercises about the videos are not designed for testing students. Beginners and all students in the wide Intermediate range seem to feel good about understanding people who speak naturally. The Lessons are designed to make it easy for them to understand the spontaneous speech. In other words, Real English presents us with hundreds of people speaking normally, which seems fast to all learners.
They're simply not used to it, and Real English represents an interesting way to make progress in this real world of the spoken word.
Both American and British English, without forgetting our many Irish interviewees in addition to non-native speakers of English
Let's begin by defining a couple of key terms which I use when speaking about the video and its interactive environment.
A Real English® lesson is a collection of interactive exercises for a main video. An exercise is based on a small portion of a main video. For example, a typical main video might be 4 or 5 minutes long, but the exercise includes a video extracted from the main clip which lasts only 5 to 30 seconds, allowing us to concentrate on a limited number of lexical items at a time.
This is Joe, the first interviewee in Lesson 29, a relatively "upper" intermediate clip. Joe’s interview is 32 seconds long. However, a total of 6 exercise pages (including 19 questions) are necessary to cover the essential vocabulary and grammar he uses during those 32 seconds. Click on play:
Like many of the interviewees who
make it to the final cut, he's a friendly, conversational type of guy. His answer
to the question "What do you like to do for fun?", which is also the
title of this lesson, takes him a long time, i.e., 32 seconds, providing us with interesting vocabulary and new grammar to exploit in the upcoming exercises immediately after this one.
Note that the audio file beneath the video provides us with a 4-second audio "helper file" (explanatory images are also "helper files"):
Audio files like this one are used in most exercises, for a great variety of reasons. In this particular case, it is used to provide a summary of what Joe said in the video, i.e., a short summary of his much longer, "conversational" reply. By this time, a student who has arrived at lesson 29 has learned to listen to these files because they often contain clues for helping him find the answer to a quiz. In this particular case, we listen to the teacher after clicking on the play button: "He likes hiking in the mountains, going to the movies, and socializing", which is also one of the 3 choices in the MC quiz. You can listen to Joe's "long answer" in the video above and compare it to the audio-only summary.
We often give the answer away, so to speak, in the form of this audio clue. Once again, the objective is to give the student good reason to listen as much as possible, regardless of his final score, which is a meaningless objective when compared to the process of listening and learning. We also want him to get the answer right thanks to his own efforts, by giving him lots of opportunities to figure it out on his own, which also seems to improve motivation. An interesting detail on the same exercise page: Look at the pictures next to each possible answer to the MC quiz. I photoshop such pictures, replacing the original head with the interviewee's head, simply to put the interviewee in contextwhenever possible, in an effort to perfect the illustration of the meaning of the corresponding text. (We met Joe on W. 57th Street in New York City, not while hiking in the mountains).
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Let's have a look at Joe's final appearance, in Exercise 5. Once again, we give away the answer in this exercise, in the spoken form only, of course. There are 6 basic types of exercises in Real English®. This is my favorite, a hybrid quiz. It starts off as a typing exercise. If the typed answer is wrong x times in a row, the exercise transforms itselfinto an easier multiple-choice quiz. I specified just one time wrong for this question, but sometimes I have good reasons to let the students try 4 times or more before it transforms itself into a Multiple Choice. I think the advantage of this type of quiz is obvious. Any student who makes an effort is never lost.
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I am trying to keep this post short, for the same reason I like to keep the exercise videos short: to maintain interest to the very end! However, you can have a look online to see other typical and very useful techniques used throughout the lessons:
Grammar in context. We never ignore grammar, but we don't often begin with it either. When the video contains a noteworthy grammar point that comes as a surprise to us, it is at least illustrated. In other cases, there are even grammar exercises based on what the video has suggested.Course organization is
turned upside down to a certain extent. Despite our outline of essential
items to include in Real English® - following our list of questions each time we go out filming - the spontaneous speech actually gathered in
our street interviews ultimately determines what is covered in Real
English®. Note: Java is necessary for the record-compare applet found on all the exercise pages, enabling the students to repeat what they hear in the lessons, and then to compare their pronunciation to native-speaker sources (both from the videos and the audio-only files). However, when you arrive at any exercise, you will see an unnecessary Windows message implying that Java could be dangerous for your computer. This is not true. It is
safe and must be regularly updated, just like Windows itself.
Questions and comments most welcome!
Official logo image, representing our Trademark in 39 countries.
It's a bit early for me to be presenting the new Mobile version of Real English®. Only a quarter of the Lessons are finished. On the other hand, the numerous videos and quizzes which have been completed provide beginners and pre-intermediate students on the go with at least 40 hours* of fun work.
Besides, it will take me until the end of the year to finish the job. More importantly for myself and other social-oriented content creators, a minimum of general feedback seems essential in order to continue the longish job with relative confidence concerning the final outcome.
Moreover, in a case like mine, the job will be interrupted by new filming in the streets, as I make brand new videos, and then new edits and finally new lessons for the new clips (BTW, a "lesson" is a collection of interactive quizzes for a small portion of a main video). So the job is never completed, really. It will only be finished the day I stop filming and make a lesson for my last good clip.
So here she is in demo form:
If you just spent 6 minutes watching this entire clip, I hope you'll leave a comment, or try it out on your own mobile device before making a comment. Concerning feedback, I was very lucky to learn that this site works pretty much the same way on Windows and Android phones. Android devices are especially important since their market share is increasing much faster than Apple's iDevices at the present time. So I tried to find someone to try it out on an Android device, and I simply googled "Mobile ESL" and within minutes I succeeded in contacting David Read, who surprised me with a screencast showing me how it looks on his Samsung Galaxy Note 2. David has created a Google+ ESL Community which he continues to develop and which is definitely worth a detour. His screencast, below, inspired me to find a way to do the same for the iPhone. He had a look at the Alphabet Lesson (Lesson 3).
I have made improvements to Lesson 3 after carefully watching Dave's screencast, but I haven't found all the solutions yet.
My next screencast will show you how the ProProfs Quiz Maker works. This is the application I have chosen for all the quizzes on Real English Mobile.
* It's impossible to make an accurate estimate of the time to be spent to complete the existing 21 lessons. Here I write "40 hours" and in the screencast, I say "80 hours". The latter estimate might be closer to the truth when speaking about a real beginner, starting with lesson 1, while also learning English with other tools.
This post is no longer relevant. The classic Real English sit https://www.real-english.com/ has been compatible with mobile devices for years.
I have not finished the new Mobile site
yet, but there are already 15 complete lessons up, with quizzes (about
80 hours of work for real beginners). You are more than welcome to use
it now, while it is still under construction.
I have added most
of the videos (58 videos already up), and I will soon go back to add the
quizzes with the short individual-interview clips, which allows the
learner to do quizzes based on very short extracts from the main video
of each lesson.
Making these short clips for the quizzes is the
longest part of the job, but it makes the learning experience much more
effective, and especially more user-friendly.
"Old" quizzes
already exist for lessons 1 to 12, including the 4 lessons in unit 8,
giving us a total of 15 complete interactive mobile lessons as of
October 22, 2012. I update progress on a weekly basis at the traditional
Real English® site at http://www.real-english.com/mobile-info.asp
Hope you like it. And it's definitely going to get better in the very near future. PS: I bought my first iPhone yesterday October 21! Up until yesterday, I was testing the new site using Mobile Device Emulators like this one, on my computer, with Safari. They are good for essential testing, and
their most important advatage is that they allow one to test not only the
different iPhones, but also Android phones such as the Galaxy, as well
as tablets, and certain Blackberry phones as well. However,
using a real iPhone has opened my eyes. I see now that I must redo the
quizzes in a different format (change of widths, especially, according
to the nature of each quiz). Everthing else looks great! The videos are
very crisp and clean, even better than the videos I see on the traditional
Real English® website!
Did you know that the slang word "sick" means cool? Neither did I until I discovered a brand new siteand YouTube channel called "Slargon". I couldn't believe it. An old guy like me had to check out the Urban Dictionary to confirm it. The new "sick" is now being used as a near-antonym of the traditonal "sick". This young lady goes on to say that if something is "sick", it's something you really like.
The site has been and is being created by the Corbo Brothers, Stephen and Jimmy. They both have MA degrees and work in the New York City Department of Education as Speech Language Pathologists We're obviously not talking about the usual cowboys we often find in the world of ESL who throw up new sites on a wing and a prayer.
On the other hand, they learned how to make video and a site just like I did, without any training, learning by doing.
"Growing up in New York", Jimmy writes "we have been exposed to many different dialects of English and we are fascinated by the different ways in which people can use language. That is what prompted us to dedicate our video language library to slang, idioms and other peculiar language".
Their videos are all spontaneous steet interviews, just like Real English. No boring actors. You meet a lot of people filmed in different parts of New York City who agree to make a "language donation" as they call it.
The videos are very short - some less than 12 seconds. The longest clip I've found so far is 30 seconds. We're talking sound bites here, and it's really a hoot!
In some of the clips, we find classic idioms such as "the cat's pajamas", but in other cases we find cool everyday expressions which are widely used by native speakers but never, or almost never taught in the ESL/EFL classroom. One thing I learned that is very
important when building a coherent language library based on the
spontaneous speech of street interviews, is how to approach prospective
interviewees, or "donators". I am lucky to have a friendly, attractive
French wife who does this job. She puts people at ease and makes them want to give us an interview. This is what Jimmy says about their approach: "Stephen tends to be the bolder brother but we do switch off approaching people to ask for language donations. We usually approach them with a short pitch about our project. "Hey, how are you? We are from slargon.com, and we're creating a video language library of slang, idioms and other peculiar language. We are looking for language donations... Do you have a word or phrase that you would like to contribute?" They obviously make a good team. Jimmy
told me "Slargon is something that has really grown from my brother
Stephen's ambition to merge technology and language services... Once we
decided that we would do the project together we hit the ground running.
Stephen went to work building a website for Slargon and I went to work
learning about Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects
for the purpose of editing".He goes on to say "This is a mouthfull, so sometimes we spend an additional 15 minutes explaining our project, and sometimes people jump right in with a word or phrase, and other times we are completely blown off. All in all our general success rate is 50-70%".
I can't help comparing this figure to Real English. After our first filming campaigns in the US and the UK in the mid-90s, we got about the same success rate. The problem comes later when we have to decide who is "good enough" to include in our library. That was my problem 3 months ago when we filmed in my new favorite spot in South Beach, Miami. I thought everybody was great while filming, but in the end, we only used about 20% of our footage.
You will also find donators who speak English as a Second Language. You see a French girl below who explains the slang version of "J'adore" (i.e., without an object) which is not exactly the same as the literal meaning. Several foreign languages have already been included in Slargon's library.
And finally, Slargon's Web 2.0 clincher: "Generally speaking we have gotten a great response on the street, people seem to love the idea. Filming is a great part of the job but we are hoping that eventually users will make their own online contributions by uploading their videos to Slargon". A word of caution in regard to young children learners. You will find some vulgar clips here too. In fact they have divided their clips into 27 categories so far, and that includes the "gross" and "lustful" categories.
For some reason or other, the Real English® Facebook page has gone slightly viral, with an average of 9,000 new likes per day over the past 6 weeks. It's a high quality page (he said modestly), but I have noticed that there are also mediocre ESL pages which suddenly go viral - with many more new likes per day than my own. I would google the phenomenon, but it would take too much time. Moreover, the title of this post is based upon the need to manage time more effectively.
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