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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Truth
With the time going, the previous learned words and the following new words caused heavy memory load.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this part, you can add extra words in the learning pool you would like to test in addition to the designed plan.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.