English that matters

Master's Thesis at NYU ITP, Spring 2016

Language evolves with medium. Today, social media influence these evolution. How can English learners leverage social media to learn more relevant English and cultural nuance?

Project Background

In South Korea there is a significant focus on English education for getting a high score in SATs. However, English textbooks in Korea tends not to provide real-life expressions. My english teacher was a TV show, Friends. It showed me the way how native speakers communicate in their daily lives, which you couldn’t learn from any textbooks. So I started thinking about the way for non-native speakers to bridge the gap between their academic accomplishment and language proficiency in real-life.

CONCEPT

EDU-TAINMENT PLATFORM: SOCIAL MEDIA + DICTIONARY + COMMENTS

I decided to use social media for my service, allowing users to learn - not only the language but also the cultural nuance. Social media is infinitely growing resources generated by real people, and people use it everyday anyway.
In order to let learners search the words or phrases from the content, I used APIs from Urban dictionary, Wordnik, and Google Translate. Since Urban dictionary provides definition of the new words by crowdsourcing, I found it very useful to look up some the informal words and phrases from social media. I use Wordnik for looking up more formal words, and Google translate is for auto-translation.

Target Users

The service is for foreign speakers who’re beyond intermediate level who can understand and communicate with native speakers in general but having a hard time to have a conversation in more casual languages which need cultural references.

USER FLOW

There are two component in my service, one is browsing the existed content and another is storing the content they want to remember. Users come to the service, once they get into topic they are interested in such as animals, memes, celebrities, etc. there will be the content related to that including the definition and comment. And if they keep the content, it will be collected as flashcards to review & memorize.
To learn about the casual expressions, I curated content from Instagram starting from the post related to memes, which are easily approachable and fun to read. It is even more effective since you can learn expressions with images.

SKETCH, PROTOTYPE, AND REPEAT

User Interface

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Web Development Process

For the interface design, my first approach was tinder-style swipe to make it feel more casual. But it turns out, swiping works with faces, not with images with many words. So based on user feedback, I updated the interface similar to social media feed, to be less disruptive.

User Test

NEXT STEP

Until there are enough users who participate to collect proper content, I need to curate more content manually, while developing ways to let users contribute seamlessly.

Also, I'm trying to create a system that motivates user participation for crowdsourced translation. At last, enrich the "image dictionary”using hashtags while filtering out the less relevant content should be completed.

ENGLISH THAT MATTERS