Guia
Helping learners engage with new languages more meaningfully
Presented at Schmidt Future's Learning Engineering Expo and awarded first place with a prize of $25,000.
Overview
With a name that comes from the Portuguese word for “guide,” Guia aims to serve as your guide to more meaningful language-learning. Where other products focus on the what or how of learning a language, Guia zeros in on the why — allowing learners to do exactly what they want with the language: engage with it in context and in culture.
Developed with Hayden Johnson, Kasra Lekan, and Sidhant Rastogi.
Problem
Language learning tools are incomplete.
Lack of real-world content. While engaging with a target language through synthetic inputs like exercises in a textbook do help learners gain exposure to the language, they can often seem disconnected from the context needed to actively engage in conversations. Without authentic input, learning materials can often feel artificial or unrelated to a learner’s personal interests or to the current events and cultural contexts where the target language (Portuguese) is spoken.
Lack of grammatical context. Many language-learning methods place their emphasis on memorizing new vocabulary words or mastering basic phrases. However, this approach of learning words in isolation doesn't provide learners with the sense of grammatical structure and context to learn what Portuguese looks like in practice. Without seeing Portuguese in context, learners miss the opportunity to study how to build sentences from scratch.
Loss of intrinsic motivation. According to a study interviewing students in the UK who were learning Swedish, motivation is at the core of successful language education. “The opportunity to communicate with native speakers of the target language” was one of the most central keys to successful second-language studies for most students. (“Students' motivation and attitudes towards learning a second language.”) However, without visible progress in conversational fluency due to the two aforementioned problems with language-learning today, it's no surprise that students of a second language often lose their motivation to continue.
An example of Toucan's word substitution in action.
Solution
Guia is a Chrome extension interface that guides learners through real-world texts in Portuguese. It can be used to gauge the difficulty of online web pages/articles, as well as recommend articles based on the desired difficulty — all while browsing the web. Guia ultimately aims to empower users with the ability to take language-learning into their own hands and freely engage with Portuguese more authentically.
With Guia, learners can learn a new language without sacrificing their personal goals and interests.
Features
Once a user visits a webpage, they can activate the extension to access Guia's feature set to get a better sense of whether this article is appropriate for them.
Difficulty estimation. Employing NLP techniques of readability analysis, Guia estimates the difficulty of a Portuguese text before the user even reads it. This allows users to make more informed decisions about their learning, saving them from potential discouragement or frustration from trying to tackle a far too difficult text.
Feature extraction. In addition to estimating difficulty, Guia further augments the learning experience by specifically highlighting potential areas of growth or areas of difficulty. This helps the user invest more time into actually learning from these areas of growth and less time searching for them.
Proficiency and interests matching.Prioritizing the enjoyment of language-learning in addition to effectiveness, Guia personalizes text recommendations not just by proficiency level, but by interests as well. Learners can improve their fluency by exploring the interests they care about.
Learning Benefits
Guia proposes an ideological shift away from learning vocabulary in isolation and toward in-context and in-culture comprehension and learning. In the field of second-language acquisition, this method — known as learning through authentic materials — has shown to be effective not only in improving learner's fluency, but also in improving their motivation and desire to engage with their target language. (Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education). A number of factors seem to be responsible for this effect.
Next Steps
Moving forward, there are a number of improvements that we plan to make to future iterations of the product. Most notably, we aim to expand Guia to many other languages in order to broaden our market scope beyond Portuguese-English learners. We also intend to expand from supporting just text-based media like articles and webpages to including other forms of media, like audio, video, and interactive speaking. Other improvements include:
- Identifying new vocabulary words and highlighting new verb conjugations in the texts themselves like a personal “helper.”
- Asking comprehension questions at the end to see how much you learned from that text and adjusting the difficulty level accordingly.
- Forming online communities of similar-level learners and allowing learners to interact/share media that they find interesting and useful.