We speak with Studycat CEO Mark Pemberton about language learning outside of the classroom. As the corona virus causes schools around China to temporarily close, we consider the possibilities and limits of using apps and technology for language learning.
Learning Language at Home With Technology - Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. Here, we usually bring you one episode every couple of weeks focusing on a topic.
We usually don't do anything related to current events, but at the moment, the coronavirus, as you may have read in the news, is having a huge effect on a lot of students. A lot of listeners are also, like I am, in China. Today, we're going to do a special episode about learning English at home.
To help us do that, we have Mark Pemberton. He's CEO of Studycat. Studycat's a company that makes fun and effective language learning apps for kids in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and German. Before starting Studycat, Mark was also a teacher.
In this episode, I asked Mark about how students can use technology to help them learn the language at home. Enjoy the interview.
Ross: Hi, Mark. Thanks for doing this at such short notice. Obviously, over here in Shanghai, a lot of the schools are shut and a huge amount of the population's working from home. It's a really strange time, with the coronavirus, both for business and for education.
Mark Pemberton: I was reading today Bloomberg saying that this is going to be the largest work‑at‑home experiment in the history of mankind. From our perspective, it's going to probably be the tipping point for home education.
Realistically, people might not be back at school until after Easter. In the meantime, there is no way that people can't turn towards online education to fill that void. It will be very interesting times.
Ross: Right. I guess a lot of studying from home is going to happen over the next few weeks and months. That's obviously not necessarily a bad thing. What are some of the advantages of getting students to study at home in general?
Mark: To me, it is obvious that if you want to learn a language, the more touch points you have with that language, the quicker you're going to achieve fluency. The gold standard for language learning is to drop yourself, immerse into a new culture, and have to speak the language, which is exactly what happened to me when I moved to Thailand.
If you don't speak the language, you can't order food. It's sink or swim. Therefore, take that assumption and build immersion around the learner. When the kids go home, you put the cartoons on in English. You put the radio on in English. Put music on in English. Surround the kid with English, and the kid will do the rest.
A lot of parents would say, "I don't know how to do this." Or, "I don't speak English." That's OK. It doesn't matter if you can't speak English. You can create the environment around your child where they will acquire the language very naturally and very quickly.
If watching cartoons is a part of that, if playing interactive games is a part of that, then even better, because there's not a lot of research or data about this.
To me, it's obvious that when a kid is in a puzzle or doing some kind of brain‑teasing activity, where they're using all of their focus and concentration, then they're learning quicker than they would be if they were just passively watching a cartoon.
Ross: I suppose as well as the motivation aspect of needing to learn a language with immersion. I guess you're also just getting fewer opportunities to forget what you've learned because everything will be recycled all the time. That seems to be a big advantage of learning on an app.
For example, for a few minutes every day, compared with going to a class once a week for a couple of hours at a time. Anyway, learning at home also allows parents to get a lot more involved in their kid's learning. What are some advantages of getting parents involved in the language learning process?
Mark: Our brand is connected learning. What we mean by connected learning is connecting the home and the school to get the best learning outcomes. There's a couple of layers to our connected learning.
The first one is connecting the home and the school. The second one is connecting parents, teachers, and kids. The kids are at the center of the learning process. If the parents are involved and the teachers are involved, and they triangulate, that is very, very powerful.
I've got pictures of me teaching back in 2001 in my school. I had this hardcore cohort of parents that came to every class, which was great because they helped me manage the class. They helped me translate sometimes.
Those parents would go home and they would walk with the kids. They play the tapes with the kids. They do the homework with the kids. Those kids just excelled because they were recycling. They were doing more work than the kids that weren't able to stay home work to...
What we're able to say is, put the CD on, put the tape on, sing the song. There's nothing else you could set them at that time. Whereas now, you can assign them homework on their favorite devices.
You can track whether they've done it or not. You could see what they did or didn't understand. It's a brave new world of language learning. I wish I had all these tools when I was teaching.
Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about how parents can best be involved? Imagine that parents being involved can either have a huge positive effect or definitely also seeing have a negative effect sometimes on kids as well.
Mark: The kids like it as long as the parents handle it well and don't do that overpowering, "You must do this, you must do that." If the parents play a role of like, "Let's do this together," the kids learn so much faster, and they're so much more fluent.
The parents who got such clunky pronunciation, that the kids get this, "I'm doing this better than mom or dad." You get this nice dynamic going if the parents play it right.
Ross: The teachers listening to this might not fit into this category, but there's definitely a lot of teachers out there who are less enthusiastic about integrating technology into the student's language learning. How do you think apps can make teachers' lives easier?
Mark: When we started doing EdTech early 2000s, I thought that there would be technology in every classroom by 2007, 2008. Then I thought, "OK, well, this is going a bit slow. It's education, maybe it's because teachers are fearful of technology, or maybe it's because the ministers of education are too slow."
Now, it's 2020, I would say, with the exception of China, education and the adoption of technology in classrooms have really hasn't progressed at all. Obviously, not all teachers, but why aren't most teachers embracing technology?
I don't understand. I've heard people say that they find it cumbersome. Maybe it's the technology's fault. Maybe they find it's a distraction in the classroom.
Maybe they find that it's hard to manage a class and manage a technology at the same time. When we were building [inaudible 6:23] schools, we were very, very aware of these issues.
We never assumed that the teachers wanted their lives made easier. We assumed that the teachers wanted to be more effective teachers. They didn't want to do monotonous report writing.
We don't want to waste time prepping for all these lessons. We don't want to waste time marking all these lessons. We want to walk into a classroom with the kids [inaudible 6:51] knowing the vocabulary. We can actually use their vocabulary in scenarios, in sentence building, in dialogues, and in fun stories.
EdTech, I've always believed, has massive potential to level the playing field. Children can go home and learn at their own pace, at their own speed. They can do it again, and again, and again until they're comfortable with the language. Then they can bring that into the classroom and practice the vocabulary learned. I think that's a wonderful outcome.
Ross: You mentioned leveling the playing field there, Mark. How can technology do that? What do you mean exactly by leveling the playing field?
Mark: There's two layers for that. The first layer is, in a specific classroom, no two kids learn the same way. No two kids have the same personality. It always struck me that the silent kids that would sit in class, they would not speak for the first year, a year and a half.
We're always trained how to deal with these kids. The way I dealt with them, I just let them be. They were never making any trouble. They're just very shy. They're only five years old.
I remember one of the silent kids, after a year, a year and a half, put a hand up, walked over to me, and said, "Teacher, may I go to the bathroom, please? I'd like to use the toilet." This kid had never spoken one word ever but she had understood all the language. She can speak complete sentences when she was ready to do so.
If you're shy and don't want to speak, how nice it would be at home, in your bedroom with the device, rather than being told to stand up and repeat this sentence, or make a sentence, or it's your turn to do this, your turn to do that. When I said level the playing field there, I was also alluding to profit on purpose.
EdTech can reach parts of the world that other education solution haven't had the ability to do. You're seeing really progressive governments in Colombia, Uruguay, that are shipping devices out to rural areas, where kids can just start learning where they can't build schools.
EdTech will be able to deliver education to the 1.5 billion kids that, right now, don't have access to education. Of course, they need devices to be able to do that. I believe that there will be a day where companies like ours will work with companies like Huawei and other major device manufacturers, and then major charities with big footprints like Room to Read.
Then we can deliver these devices with loads of educational software uploaded, and then deliver these devices to the communities.
Ross: I love that example of the quiet student just absorbing all that language. I also heard Stephen Krashen give an example of talking about, at a conference giving a presentation, and walking up to someone in the front row with a microphone and seeing the look of fear in their faces.
He was saying that, as teachers, we hate being asked questions at conferences. That's something that we do with our students all the time.
Anyway, your app, I believe gets used by a lot of teachers in their classes. You must have seen lots of examples of teachers in schools encouraging students to use technology at home and to help in the language learning. Can you give us an example of how that actually works in practice?
Mark: We did a big launch a year ago in Shiyan with a group of 40 kindergartens. It went really well. The teachers complained that they didn't know what to do because the kids knew all the vocabulary when they came into the classroom, which always made me laugh.
They did some really cool stuff. They would ask the parents to record the kids at home doing their app activities. We got all these videos of kids singing, dancing around the living room, really got lit up by the songs. They started getting the kids to sing the songs every afternoon at the end of class outside the kindergarten.
When the parents arrive to pick them up, the kids are all there singing the songs and doing all these different motions and actions. The feedback from the principals of those schools was that the parents had stopped having to send their kids to after school to learn English because they were learning so much English in the school.
The blended learning, the flipped learning was working. That, to me, is a success because you're saving the kid's time. The kids in China are not having much of a childhood. The pressure is on from when you're two, three years old. It's the same in Japan. It's the same in Korea.
The pressure on kids to do a 7:30 start all the way through to 9:00 or 10:00 at night, when they're only four years old, I just don't think that's right. I don't think there's enough time for them to play. I don't think there's enough time for them to sleep.
I would hope that by using their time more efficiently, they could get more rest, more sleep, and more playtime, which is what children need when they're growing up, especially their age.
Ross: You mentioned that by using that flipped classroom approach, students learn more effectively and didn't actually need to go to after school English programs anymore. Can you imagine that time in the future when apps or other technology will eventually just replace teachers completely?
Mark: Technology would never replace teachers. There will be books in classrooms for the next 50 years. There will be teachers in classrooms for the next 50 years.
The notion that AI and robots and technology are going to replace education systems is a fallacy. Everyone should embrace technology as a tool to enhance your ability to teach. That's what it is.
Human beings are very unique in the sense that we have this urge to teach. We have this urge to pass knowledge down. It's in our DNA, like it is in no other animals to pass on and to teach, the love to teach.
We love teaching and we love being taught. The way that society is being built and developed with kids going to schools, I just don't see that changing in the next 50, 100 years.
I've gone full circle as well. I've built systems in 2007. My mindset was, replace the teachers, replace the classroom, build systems that don't need teachers or classrooms. Now, I've come around to a much easier state of mind. If there is a classroom, there is a teacher.
That's much easier to build and design technology because you all work together to get the outcome that you want. I'm not saying that the way we educate or the way we use education right now is optimal. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's not going to change.
Ross: One other opportunity I wanted to ask you about, Mark, was with AI. A lot gets written and said about AI. Can you tell us about what you think the potential is for AI in helping language learning in the future?
Mark: AI, I'm not so sure about this. So much hype about what AI is going to do in education. It's a lot of VC hype about that right now. I wouldn't be putting my money to have into AI. We use very simple AI in our systems for adaptive learning. We are able to see whether a child has issues with certain words.
Then we simply use a very simple machine algorithm method to keep reintroducing the words in reward games. We pull trouble words out and we keep re‑displaying them to the kids so that they learn them. I think that's very powerful.
I don't think that the brave new world that a lot of people are investing in in terms of AI is going to be as big as people are hoping it will be.
Ross: Mark, thanks so much again for coming on. I also know that because of the Coronavirus, you've open up your app for teachers and students to use for free for the time being. Can you tell us how can teacher's listening get access to that?
Mark: We've just released a campaign today, Ross, that we are opening up all of our language learning apps to all communities affected by school closure for free usage until this crisis has passed. If you go to studycat.com, you will see all of our apps available there to be downloaded.
In China, we have a WeChat platform. If you search for Studycat, you'll find our WeChat platform. Fun English is available there on all Android devices, all iOS devices for the next month, for free. We've survived these things before with SARS. In the meantime, Studycat will do what we can to help you entertain your kids.
Ross: Great. Thanks again so much for joining us, Mark.
Mark: Cheers.
Ross: For everyone listening, please stay safe. We'll see you again next episode. Goodbye.