speech recognition

Apple’s electric car and the death of language teaching as we know it

When I was four, going on five, a TV show called Knight Rider premiered in the UK. I loved it and remained a fan for most of my childhood (OK, I admit it; I’m still a fan). There was The Hoff, of course  –  all leather jackets, open shirt buttons and swagger  –  but the real star of the show was K.I.T.T  – Knight Industries Two Thousand  –  the ‘advanced, artificially intelligent, self-aware and nearly indestructible car’. Over thirty years later Apple and Google are in a head-to-head race to bring K.I.T.T’s spiritual successor  –  the driverless car  –  to market. And, as a little-known and hard-to-spot side effect, the ramifications for the teaching of languages, especially English, could be huge.

Geoff Jordan vs. Duolingo

More than a million people a day connect to Duolingo, an app which causes much derision in ELT circles with attacks on its pedagogical validity. But what happens if you judge it through the prism of research into Second Language Acquisition? Geoff Jordan finds out.

Social Enterprise in ELT – The E3 Project

The primary aim of the E3 Project is to engage those with the lowest levels of spoken English, particularly women over the age of 30, who are isolated within diaspora communities but committed to living in the UK. This is based around three main areas; digital inclusion, positive integration and active citizenship.

Categories ELT

The Future of ELT

It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more

Did Apple accidentally invent a cool language learning app?

“What is today’s date?”
“It’s now Friday, September 20, 2013.”

Mike S. Boyle is one of the authors of American English FileYou can follow him on Twitter at @heyboyle or join one of his webinars on September 26 and 27. This post originally appeared on Mike’s blog mikesboyle.com.

I’ve just upgraded my iPhone to the new iOS 7 operating system and discovered some amazing improvements to Siri, the virtual assistant that responds to your voice. The old Siri barely understood a word I said, but the all-new Siri understands my English perfectly. Not only that, it even perfectly comprehends my far-from-perfect Mandarin Chinese.

So, what is the potential for the new Siri as a language learning app? How can it help learners of English?

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The Grading Game: birth of the “first person tutor”

The Grading Game is an addictive action word game centered around the pursuit and eradication of grammar and spelling errors. The game’s levels take the form of students’ papers, with a fresh set of errors generated for each play. Meanwhile, the papers themselves cover the most interesting and unusual topics, from the history of ramen to … Read more