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EnglishCentral Launches New Pronunciation Center

EnglishCentral Launches New Pronunciation Center

New Machine Learning Techniques Double Precision for Learners

September 9, 2021. Boston, MA. EnglishCentral today released its new Pronunciation Center, the industry’s first online English pronunciation tool trained on over 1 billion learner events.

For the last 10 years, our learners have provided us over 1 billion learning events on how they learn English, said Alan Schwartz, Founder & CEO of EnglishCentral. We have used this data to create what we call a “Teacher-Machine Learning Loop” that leverages our team of over 600 trained professional English teachers to train and improve our IntelliSpeechSM machine learning platform.

The new Pron Center, powered by IntelliSpeechSM, more than doubles the accuracy in detecting errors in learners’ pronunciation and fluency compared to previous versions. The goal with AI-feedback on EnglishCentral is to emulate what great teachers do. For example, instead of pointing out each and every pronunciation mistake a student makes, a great teacher focuses on just those egregious mistakes that make the students speech unintelligible. This is key to maintain students’ motivation to keep practicing. The 2x increase in accuracy in our latest version is specifically related to reducing “false alerts”, i.e., penalizing learners for mistakes that are in fact not mistakes that matter for intelligibility.

“EnglishCentral has led the market here for English pronunciation training for almost a decade now,” said Dr. Charles Browne, PhD at Meiji Gakuin University, and developer of the New General Service List (NGSL), a popular high-frequency vocabulary list used worldwide. “In addition to the accuracy improvements with this latest Pron Center, the tight integration with high-frequency vocabulary lists means learners can focus their speaking practice on just those words that matter the most. EnglishCentral is the only vocab tool on the market I am aware of that allows students to systematically practice speaking high frequency words in context,” added Dr. Browne.

The Pronunciation Center is currently available on the desktop and mobile version of the EnglishCentral website. It will be available on Android and iOS apps later this year.

Press Contact:
Shun Furuyama, Marketing Director, press@englishcentral.com, Phone: +815038023236

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AI Expert Steven Chambers to Join EnglishCentral Advisory Board

AI Expert Steven Chambers to Join EnglishCentral Advisory Board


May 15, 2020. Boston, MA. EnglishCentral, the most widely adopted AI-powered English language conversation platform in the world, today announced that Steven Chambers will join as a strategic advisor.

Mr. Chambers is a recognized leader in artificial intelligence and speech recognition, having served as President at Nuance Communications, the world’s leading speech recognition company, and as CMO of Sense, Inc., named by VentureBeat in 2019 as one of the world’s top 100 artificial intelligence companies.

“Steve’s background in AI is super helpful to us at this stage in our corporate life given his leadership of both entrepreneurial and multi-billion dollar organizations at scale”, said Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral. “Additionally, Steve’s recent focus exploring the nexus of innovation and educational pedagogies via his PhD candidacy at the Harvard School of Education fits directly in with our key mission: how best to combine recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to support better teaching and better outcomes for learners. With industry-leaders like Steve and Mike Phillips, CEO of Sense, on our team, I am confident we are on the right path to build the industry’s leading solutions combining live teaching and artificial intelligence into what we call our Teacher-Machine Learning Loop.”

About EnglishCentral:

EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted AI-powered English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 1000 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of video lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

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Meet the New EnglishCentral

Meet New EnglishCentral

The latest version of EnglishCentral is now live!

We are proud to announce the latest version of EnglishCentral is now available in 10 languages. It’s a ground-up rewrite of our platform using the latest progressive web technology, built by our teams in Boston, Ankara, Tokyo, Seoul, and Manila.

And, we are just getting started… We have a new version of our IntelliSpeechSM assessment platform on the way next quarter too. To help us continue to innovate further in applying the latest technologies to language learning, we are hiring speech science engineers, mobile UX developers as well as great ELL teachers and linguists. If interested, please reach out at careers@englishcentral.com.

See What’s New!

My Feed

Get course, video, and vocabulary study recommendations that match your interests and level.

Weekly Progress

Set daily goals and earn “streaks” when you study every day.

Overall Progress

Track your progress and what’s required to reach the next level on EnglishCentral.

Discover the New EnglishCentral

Try the new design and features and let us know (contact us) what you think.

Happy learning

The EnglishCentral Team

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EnglishCentral IntelliSpeech℠ Technology

EnglishCentral IntelliSpeech℠ Technology

EnglishCentral’s “special sauce” has always been our internally developed IntelliSpeech℠ assessment technology. Teachers appreciate how IntelliSpeech℠ motivates students to speak outside of the classroom. Students appreciate the instant feedback and the game dynamic of trying to improve their speaking scores.

EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech℠ is trained on hundreds of millions of lines of speech from students from over 100 countries, using the latest Machine Learning techniques. It assesses learners’ speaking ability across the following dimensions:

Pronunciation measures the acoustical qualities of students’ speech over 64,000 possible triphones (combinations of phonemes), stress and prosodics. 

Fluency is still based on duration and pause rate of the speech.

Completion is still based on whether the user speaks all words, or drops words.

Error Types

As the learner speaks, Intellispeech℠  provides feedback according to the following types of errors:

feed

Line Score

Learners get a line score between 0 and 100 points for each line spoken. Learners lose points for each error made. The amount of points learners lose per error is weighted based on the number of words in the line. For shorter lines, learners lose more points per error than for longer lines.

Only the final version of each line spoken counts towards the users final score on the Video Grade. So, if a line is repeated several times, only the last version counts towards the Video Grade.

Video Grades

The video grade is the cumulative measure (i.e. the weighted average) of the line scores received by the learner from speaking lines in the video.

Intellispeech℠ computes a percentile relative to other learners to produce a video grade. For instance, if we determine that the speech for the video was 75% better than other learners, the learner would get a “B+” as a video grade.

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Percentiles are mapped to grades as follows:

Pronunciation Center

The Pronunciation Center (“Pron Center”) on EnglishCental is where students’ feedback and progress on their pronunciation is tracked and where they can find exercises to help remediate their pronunciation challenges.

At the heart of the Pron Center are the 4 steps of our Pronunciation Learning Cycle:

  1. Speak Anywhere on EC

    2. The Pron Center automatically collects all words students have trouble pronouncing during any speaking activity on EnglishCentral, such as speaking lines in our interactive video player, or speaking words in our Vocab Builder.

  2. Pron Center Collects Weak Words

    3. Students then use the Pron Center to focus on their weak words, either focusing on their weakest words, or their weakest Phonemes.

  3. Practice with Courses & Tutors

    4. To help learn how to form Sounds correctly, students follow one of EnglishCentral’s pronunciation courses, or take a GoLive! lesson, 1-on-1 with a tutor and get feedback on their pronunciation and fluency.

  4. Master the Sounds

    5. The Pron Center tracks student’s progress on each word, and automatically removes the word from study when students successfully speak the word 3 times in a row anywhere in the site.

Pronunciation Courses

IntelliSpeech℠ has analyzed our users English pronunciation over hundreds of millions of recorded utterances and identified the most common problematic sounds of speakers for each native language region. Based on this analysis and speech data, we have designed pronunciation courses — Top 10 Challenges — where learners can focus on the most challenging Sounds for speakers from their native language, using authentic videos. We currently have customized pronunciation courses for: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, Vietnamese, and Arabic.

pron course

Our Speech Database

For the last 10 years, our learners have provided us a trove of data (over 600,000,000 speech utterances from over 100 countries) on how they learn English.

Our reference models are also training on large amounts of data collected from native speakers speaking the authentic speech from our videos (as opposed to many other corpora which may contain artificial “read speech”).

We use this data to create a “Machine Learning Loop” that combines this large data set with feedback from a team of over 600 trained professional English teachers who have analyzed student speaking ability in over 500,000 1-on-1 live sessions. The result is the “machine” (our online self-study platform) learns from the feedback teachers provide, and at the same time, teachers learn from the feedback the machine provides on learners’ strengths and weaknesses.

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EnglishCentral Launches New Speech Assessment Platform with Kirihara

EnglishCentral Launches New Speech Assessment Platform with Kirihara


Tokyo, Japan – June 13, 2019. EnglishCentral, the leading provider of online English conversations solutions, and Kirihara Shoten, a leading provider of textbooks to the high school market in Japan, today announced the launch of the latest version of EnglishCentral’s AI-powered speaking assessment platform, IntelliSpeech℠ .

The new version of IntelliSpeech℠ is able to accurately grade and provide feedback not only on students’ pronunciation, but also on students’ word choice, vocabulary usage, syntax and even task completion. IntelliSpeech℠ can do this kind of complex assessment as it seamlessly combines state-of the-art automated speech assessment with human-assisted assessment.

The new platform was deployed this month with several of Kirihara’s highschool customers in Japan. The platform gives students sample test scores on speaking tests similar to those given as part of the Eiken Test in Practical English Proficiency, the most popular speaking assessment test given in Japan, taken by an estimated 3 million students per year. Significantly, in addition to test scores, the platform also gives detailed feedback on students’ spoken answers so they know the areas to practice and improve. Teachers using the new platform now have the opportunity to administer weekly practice tests for the Eiken exam and other English assessment programs, and get the benefit of accurate assessments, including detailed feedback, within 48 hours.

Most importantly, the use of IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment makes the test affordable to all public school children in Japan. There are more than 4,800 high schools in Japan and very few have native English speaking teachers. Bringing low cost speaking solutions into the high school market fits well with the Japanese government’s plan to introduce Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the classroom and, for the first time beginning in 2020, to incorporate an English speaking test into college entrance exams.

“We are very excited to be working with Kirihara as our channel to market for our new IntelliSpeech℠ assessment platform,” said Hirofumi Matsumura, General Manager of EnglishCentral Japan. “We are at a real inflection point in the English learning market, given the focus on speaking by the K-12 market reacting to the upcoming changes in the college entrance exams. “

“This latest product deepens our partnership with EnglishCentral,” added Masaya Monma, CEO of Kirihara Shoten. “We already offer EnglishCentral’s advanced speech solutions to over 60,000 high school students, and we look forward to being able to provide cutting edge test solutions to high school students across the country with this next-generation AI platform.”

About Kirihara Shoten:
Kirihara Shoten is a leading publisher with a long tradition of excellence in the Japanese education market. Kirihara Shoten is a particularly major player in the high school market in Japan, with a leading position in both the English Language teaching and Japanese Language teaching segments. Some of its best-selling titles include FACTBOOK for grammar reference, Empower for grammar study and PRO-VISION and WORLD TREK for high school students studying English. Learn more at www.kirihara.co.jp.

About EnglishCentral:
EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted online English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 500 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of videos lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

EnglishCentral Contact:
Hirofumi Matsumura, General Manager
Phone: +815038023236

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EnglishCentral now available on Moodle

EnglishCentral now available on Moodle


EnglishCentral’s library of 10,000 interactive videos lessons for English learning is now available on Moodle.  Moodle is an open source, learning platform with over 68 million users and 55,000 sites deployed worldwide.

With our new Moodle module, teachers can now give students access to EnglishCentral’s unique video library, vocabulary learning and speaking technology, without giving up the security and convenience of Moodle’s LMS for storing student information and student progress.

Adding EnglishCentral Videos

The entire database of EnglishCentral videos can be accessed from within Moodle through a Search Feature. Teachers can search for and select videos based on topic, learning objective, video length, or level.  There are 7 levels of videos on EnglishCentral, ranging from CEFR A1 to C2.

EnglishCentral Features

Each EnglishCentral video lesson includes:

  • WATCH.  Students watch videos with transcripts and a bilingual dictionary, clicking on any word in the video they don’t know or would like to study.
  • LEARN.  Based on words selected by students, the player build a close activity for students to learn the words from the videos, and
  • SPEAK.   Then, using EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech assessment technology,  students speak the words in the context of sentence, getting instant feedback on their pronunciation and fluency.

Goal Setting

Teachers can set goals for watching videos, learning words, and speaking lines all from within the Moodle Settings Page:

Students View

Students can track the number of videos watches, vocabulary learned, and line spoken for each activity.    Their progress is updated in real-time.

studentsviewmoodle

Gradebook & Reports

Teacher can track Student progress against the set goals via the Moodle Gradebook Students overall completion % for each Moodle activity is shown in the Moodle Gradebook.

gradebook2

Mobile Support

The EnglishCentral Module is using responsive designs and therefore can be used on supported mobile devices, which include Android 5.0 and later, and IOS 11 and later.

References

This EnglishCentral Module for Moodle was developed with Prof. Gordon Bateson from Kochi University of Technology in Japan.  Gordon is currently using this with his students in a Presentation Course and has also created a demo course for  Science English, each deployed using the new EnglishCentral Module for Moodle.

Demos of these courses are available upon request. Please fill out the form below to schedule a demo.

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    EnglishCentral Opens New R and D Center in METU Technopark

    EnglishCentral Opens New R and D Center in METU Technopark
    Grand Opening Includes President Erdoğan

    Ankara, Turkey – February 18, 2019 – EnglishCentral, the leading provider of online English conversation solutions, today announced the grand opening of an R&D center in Ankara, Turkey. EnglishCentral joined President Erdoğan of Turkey as part of the grand opening of the METU Technopark, IT & Innovation Center, a newly designated high-tech R&D Center in central Ankara.

    At the heart of the Center is Middle East Technical University (METU), the leading technical university in Turkey. As President Erdoğan articulated at the grand opening, “the idea of the Center is to form a close collaboration between the university and industry, powered by the world’s leading technology companies that bring an innovative spirit to the technopark”.

    EnglishCentral is proud to be one of the founding tenants in the new technopark, along with other technology leaders such as Samsung, Tüpraş, the largest energy company in Turkey, and Onedio, the premier social media site in Turkey.

    The EnglishCentral team, located in the technopark, now consists of 30 members, and will serve as one of the key R&D centers for EnglishCentral globally, focusing on machine learning and speech recognition, the two technologies behind our proprietary speech assessment system called IntelliSpeech℠.

    “We have been incredibly impressed by the level of talent we’ve been able to hire at our tech center in Turkey,” said Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral, Inc. “We are hiring top talent out of METU, Bilkent and other universities, and the team there is now working on our most challenging projects to serve our customers in Turkey as well as globally in Japan and other countries.

    “Our plan is to use Turkey as our base to expand to both toward Europe and towards the Middle East”, said Kağan Cihangiroğlu, EnglishCentral’s General Manager for Turkey & the Middle East. “In addition to technical talent, we have teamed with up with a number of the leading universities in Turkey to develop English language learning curriculum that leverages our strengths in Speaking Assessment, and Adaptive Learning.”

    For a tour of our new office in Metu Technopark, check out this video:

    About EnglishCentral:
    EnglishCentral is the most widely adopted online English language conversation platform in the world, changing the way students and professionals across the globe learn to speak English. Adopted by over 500 universities, schools and corporations in over 100 countries, the company delivers interactive, video-based language learning experiences for both self-study and one-on-one tutoring, providing one of the most widely adopted and complete platforms for practicing and mastering English conversation online. Its extensive library of videos lessons, proprietary IntelliSpeech℠ speech assessment technology, and pre-built course modules guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. EnglishCentral entered the Turkish market in 2011, and now has over 500,000 registered users in Turkey. In addition, EnglishCentral has established partnerships with many of the leading universities and companies in Turkey, including, Bahçeşehir University, TOBB University, Bilkent University, Bilgi University, Turkish Airlines, Şişecam, Turkish Ground Services, and many more.
    ­
    EnglishCentral Contact:
    Kağan Cihangiroğlu
    General Manager for Turkey & the Middle East
    Phone: +903122405045
    Email: kagan.cihangiroglu@englishcentral.com

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    Teacher Tools: Setting Goals & Tracking Student Progress

    Teacher Tools: Setting Goals & Tracking Student Progress


    Please use this post as a guide as you create your syllabus and use our teacher tools to set goals for students and track their progress through our reports:

    %e3%82%b9%e3%82%af%e3%83%aa%e3%83%bc%e3%83%b3%e3%82%b7%e3%83%a7%e3%83%83%e3%83%88-2017-03-01-15-14-51Learn/Quiz Progress

    Students get “Learn Progress” for any word they successfully complete in learn mode or in a vocab quiz. This allows teachers to set word study goals that cover both the word typing cloze activity in Learning Mode as well as the definition matching quiz in Quiz Mode.

    Because our hope is to help students retain knowledge of the words they are studying in their long-term memory, Time Interval Learning in MyWords will continue to drive how words are studied on EnglishCentral. Students can make progress on words only after the applicable time interval has elapsed.

    imgpsh_fullsize-1

    Therefore, Time Interval Learning constraints prevents a student, for instance, from getting credit for studying the same word five times in one day. On the other hand, it does give students credit for learning the same word after the applicable time interval has lapsed. In this way, the system encourages review and multiple exposure to words.

     

    Speak Progress

    Speak Lines

    In March 2017, we settled on Spoken Lines as the key metric for setting speaking goals and measuring student’s speaking progress.  We count only unique lines, so while students are encouraged to speak lines multiple times to improve their video speaking grade, only the final instance of the line will be counted towards their line goal. We recommend setting a goal of 50 lines per week (this is now the default), which is equivalent to approximately one hour of study time. You can, of course, increase or decrease the number of lines for the goal, depending on the needs of your students or your curriculum.

    Speaking Grades

    To assessing student’s speaking ability, rather than just quanity of student’s speaking output, we recommend teachers use Speaking Grades (A to F).    Teachers can see grades for a single video or across all final lines spoken by the student over any defined period of time.  Note, we count only the last attempt the student made on a line towards the calculated overall grade

    GoLive Tutoring

    Teachers that are using our Premium GoLive! Product that include 1:1 tutoring (“GoLive!) can now set goals for numbers of tutor sessions in the Teacher Tools.  Note this only applies to teachers who are using our Premium Product (see Plans for more details). For most teachers using our Academic Product, they will not see any setting for GoLive! in the goal setting interface.

    Mobile Access

    Student progress is now fully available on their Android or IOS mobile devices.    Students can see their progress on their “My Classes” home from the main menu on their apps.

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    How to Integrate EnglishCentral in Moodle

    How to Integrate EnglishCentral in Moodle

    The EnglishCentral Moodle module you can add video lessons from EnglishCentral directly into Moodle. To learn more about the the EnglishCentral Moodle Module, please visit our blog post here.   To try out EnglishCentral on Moodle, you can go to the test site.

    This post details how your school’s IT staff can integrate the module into your Moodle site.   Once you are ready to install the EnglishCentral module in your Moodle site, please follow the steps below.

    Installing the EnglishCentral Module
    1. Download the module zipfile from here.
    2. Unzip the file to your local computer.
    3. Rename the folder that was created to “englishcentral”.
    4. Upload the “englishcentral” folder to your [moodle site]/mod folder using FTP or CPanel.
      or
      Zip the folder up, visit your Moodle site’s “site administration -> plugins -> install plugins” page. Drag the zip file into the ZIP Package area. If the “mod” folder does not have the correct permissions you will see a warning message and will need to change the permissions, or use the FTP/CPanel method.
    5. Visit your Admin/Notifications page so that the module gets installed.

    *For both methods, at the end of the installation process, the configuration settings will be displayed.

    Configuring the EnglishCentral Module

    To configure the EnglishCentral Module, you must:

    1. Get a PartnerID, Consumer Key, Consumer Secret and Encrypted Secret from EnglishCentral, by filling out the form at the end of this post.
    2. You should receive an email reply back from EnglishCentral with the information necessary to add in the Activity Modules setting as follows:

    Creating an EnglishCentral Activity
    1. Once you have created a course in Moodle, now add activities that contain EnglishCentral videos:
      screenshot_73.png
    2. Choose EnglishCentral activity and click on Add.
      Screenshot_74
    3. Define Activity Name, Description, Timing, Goals, etc.  Click on “Save Display”.
      screenshot_72.png
    Adding Videos to the Activity
    1. Use the video search bar to search for topics, keywords or key vocabulary.  Navigate and search for videos you want to use in the activity.
      Screenshot_70
    2. You’ll be given a list of videos. Click on the plus icon to add the video to the activity.
      screenshot_71.png
    3. The video will be added to that activity and will be shown above the search bar.
      Screenshot_75
    4. To delete the video from the activity, just drag the video to the trash bin. Click on ok when prompted to confirm if you want to delete the video from the activity.
      Screenshot_69
    Getting Started

    To get started, fill out this request form:

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      New Search Feature Now Available

      New Search Feature Now Available

      We are pleased to announce an improved version of our search feature.

      Here are some of the benefits:

      1. Increased performance and speed. Our new search is powered by Amazon’s ElasticSearch and is 5 times faster than its previous version.

      2. More accurate search results. Our new search yields more accurate search results. For example, inflections of search terms are now included in the video search results (ex: bikes and biking for the word bike.) Word search results also show the closest match plus all inflected forms of the word.

      3. Favoriting words from search results. You can now add new words to My Words directly from word search results by favoriting them.

      image1

      4. Add videos and courses directly from search results. Teachers can now build their class curriculum directly from the search results page by “adding to class” with one click. Before, teachers could only add videos and courses to class pages by clicking the “add to class” button on Browse, video detail page, or course detail page.

      image3

      Search Roadmap

      Here is our roadmap for further enhancements to our search feature.

      1. Teacher Tools

      The new search feature will be added to the Curriculum tab so teachers can add videos and courses directly from that page.

      2. iOS and Android apps

      We are also going to add search to our IOS and Android apps. Our plan is to provide the same enhanced features described above for the Web, implemented natively in both apps.

      3. Others?

      Please add your own suggestions and comments below, or contact us regarding how to improve Search functionality on EnglishCentral.

      Happy Learning,
      The EnglishCentral Team