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English learning App
Chinglish

An English vocabulary development assistant which help the students to get rid of the boring learning process and enjoy the growth in vocabulary development with dynamic community

At a Glance

Chinese students are taking unbelievable pressure on their shoulder in taking exams, in which English Test plays an important role in his or her academic and career path. For instance, CET-4( Undergraduate graduation requirement of all universities ), Toefl, GRE, GMAT and many other exams determine one's application’s final result.

The Status in Quo

As a practitioner with strong curiosity, I have tried a lot of possible English Learning methods created or concluded by influentiafl teachers as well as different vocabulary learning Apps. The poor outcomes makes me realize the defects in these applications. It’s easy for students to feel vapid and fatigue in a long run preparation under great pressure. Thus, I ask myself, how to help students to memorize thousands new words in a more efficient and intriguing process?

A lot of tests
Competition Product Analysis
Comparative analysis

In fact, there are fruitful choices in the market for students. However, students still cannot get a good learning result with the help of these apps. So I raised a Focus Discussion Group to get the students' perspectives.

Focus Group Discussion
  • What are the traditional English learning methods?
  • Popular learning apps amongst Chinese Students and their feeling
  • Why they give up in the half?
Comparative analysis
Traditional Learning Methods
Traditional Learning Habits
Traditional Learning Habits

In most cases, vocabulary learning habits of Chinese students were developed by their teachers instead of by themselves. Plus the highly stressed preparation atmosphere before Gaokao. Students would lose their motivation in continuously expanding vocabulary after entering into a university as they used to do.

Major Challenges
Effective learning method

The Pursuit

Social works, part-time job, disciplinary courses and assignment has diluted their time to develop vocabulary, whcih caused the consequence that students usually begin to prepare for their tests before half a month or less. So the students felt great anxiety and frustration because of the poor accumulation and preparation.

Uneffective learning method

The Truth

Forgetting curve
Fast Speed of Forgetting

With the time going, the previous learned words and the following new words caused heavy memory load.

Spare time
Fragmented Learning Time

Students' timetable are divided by different activities in different sites with continuously move. In other words, it 's challenging for Chinese students to raise their execution, follow the Ebbinghaus forgiving curve asked by other apps and review the new learned words under the instructions every time with such pace of studying and working.

Similar format
Homograph & Homophone
& Other similar words

To accumulate new vocabulary, students always confused with these similar words in form or pronunciation. In order to avoid misunderstanding in reading and listening, it would take students a lot of time to tidy, classify and remember.


Key Words Memorizing Method

Pain is the common situation for most of Chinese students without efficient learning method. I aim to solve this problem with an mechanism, a methodology or an application which totally different from those on the market.

Learning method

Students will feel exceedingly tired and boring after the high-strength glossary learning after a period of time. So i want to motivate every single person to use their specific memory, interests and knowledge to remember a word and share them. Though it is hard to re member some words through the graphical method sometimes , There are still a lot of ways to remember it though traditional ways like the words lists classified by subjects, roots, affix and so on so forth .

Crowdsourcing Learning Community
Crowd-sourcing community

Different from Card Punching System other apps contain, Chinglish has an more active mutual promotion mechanism with vitality. Every person can donate his or her own ideas and thinking in how to remember a word more easily. So, they would benefit from each other because of the various remember methods in community and follow the methods or arranged word lists they prefer.

Student's time is pretty dispersive, so it is difficult to strictly follow the The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Most of us has experienced the problem that missed the review requirement of Apps for one day or even longer. The apps asked us to review all of the words we missed in one time. The congestion of old words combined with the new learned words causes resistance for students to

The Red(Unknown)-Yellow(Not Sure)-Green(Unfamiliar) (RYG) system is aim to solve this problem. Students can restart at the place the leave several days before.Or, if he or she is preparing for a challenging test, students can review several times in one day based on their personal needs.
For example, review 10 green words one time, he or she also need to review 20 yellow words and 30 red words. The proportion can be resized by themselves.


Logic Framework
Methodology
Sketches & Interface Design
low-fi prototype

I created a complete process from selecting, learning, testing and sharing to illustrate the final mobile app solution -- How to develop students' vocabulary interestingly and effectively.

1ST MOVE -- STEP ABOARD

The very beginning of Chinglish is its Sharing Community, learners can select the recommendations from the back-end operation team, see the professional articles and other relative news and choose the words lists summarized by Chinglish or other users.

Front page

2ND MOVE -- ADD WORDS

Browse different words lists to save the words into learning space. And save other users' remembering methods if it is good for you as well.

word list
word list
3RD MOVE -- PREPARE FOR TEST

In this part, you can add extra words in the learning pool you would like to test in addition to the designed plan.

Review Mechanism for One Time
Memory test
Memory test
4TH MOVE -- TEST YOUR WORDS

During the test, you can create a new test lists of Homograph & Homophone & any words you can built connection with others, and review/save them.

start testing memory Chinglish don't want you to press the button and slip of mind but ask you to type by yourself and keep focus all the test.
start testing memory Ops! I am not sure about it. Have I once seen a similar words with a prefix of CON before?
start testing memory If you just need to see the hint, we still prepared the synonym words for you.
start testing memory You can choose the similar words from your review pool based on syllable and save them to your lists.
save the result Save them to your lists or create a new one.
save the result Get ready to review your answer.

5TH MOVE -- CHECK & SAVE

Instead of checked by system, you can make your own decision on the answer. If you just made a tiny mistake on one word and don't want to review it again. Just tap it to GREEN(Familiar); If you have answered a word correctly in accident, tap it to Yellow(Not Sure) and review it in next time. If you have remembered words successfully, then degrade it to Red(Unfamiliar).

tag level of memorizaiton

If you have remembered words successfully, then upgrade it from RED(Unfamiliar) to YELLOW(Not Sure); from YELLOW(Not Sure) to GREEN(Familiar).
Or vise versa.

new test Now user can check their answer and give a color of evaluation to it.
level of memorization checking Evaluated


Associate the word and edit the remembering method.
Besides the basic meaning and example sentence, you can add your individual graphical remebering method. Or take others note to remember this word.

save the method you prefer to remember a word Long press a word to open the panel, edit remembering method/ check similar words, add it to the lists and see other lists contain this word.
Users DIY their own way to remember User can add personal learning method of the word to it.
FINAL MOVE -- REVIEW & SHARE

The finish panel will show your test performance and the lists you have saved from this test.


The summarized list will be saved as a copy from the review pool so you can review it anytime as well as the review system and add it into a test again if you want.

finish one-round of memorizing
go to aged trees project
go to BCI project

© 2017 Xunan Zhou All rights Reserved