“A couple years ago, I would say English by far outweighed everything else we were doing by a lot, but what we found is there is a lot more demand for world languages. … People who are bilingual have a lot of advantages,” Quenzer said. “Our workforce needs to be more bilingual so we can serve our customers overseas and here in the U.S.”
Quenzer said one of the most exciting parts of the program is a segment where students can have interactive conversations with the computer.
“To actually have that conversation where the program knows in essence what you know and what you don’t know already, you can [use] that speech recognition tool, [which] lets you know if you’re understandable—and it really puts you in a space where you’re much more prepared to converse,” she said.
Adding a language acquisition program into the curriculum can allow for other teacher-led activities.
“We’re freeing teachers up to not have to do the conversation drill, the rote memorization of vocabulary, because the computers are helping students to do that at [the students’] own pace. The teachers are freed up to do what they got into teaching for, which is bringing the language alive in the classroom and getting students very engaged and excited for classroom-based learning,” Quenzer said. “We’re really flipping the model.”
For translating the language acquisition process to writing, teachers and students can turn to WordQ+SpeakQ.
- New film fights negative perception of teachers - September 16, 2011
- Textbook-free schools share experiences, insights - September 7, 2011
- Social websites are latest sources for plagiarized material - September 1, 2011