#coachbot

I wrote a guest post over on the Learner Coaching ELT blog:

I read From English Teacher to Learner Coach only recently. I received a glowing recommendation from a fellow language coach, Lýdia Machová, and the more I read, the more enthusiastic I became. The methods described in the book mesh pretty well with those I developed through my own studies of various languages. This was an approach suited not only to those learning English, but rather something that could (and should!) be adopted by the thousands of native English-speakers who struggle to learn a second language each year.

Indeed, the general message of the book – one I interpreted as ‘we don’t have to wait to be taught; we can learn for ourselves’ – is something that I believe has important implications for how we go about education in the coming decades. (I was especially pleased to learn a new word – heutagogy – for this somewhat hard-to-define practice of self-education). Seth Godin has written about the demise of the system of factory education and others are tackling this from various angles.

I was lucky to be awarded a scholarship to learn to code apps for Android phones. 10,000 such scholarships were awarded (from 70,000 applicants) to citizens of the European Union through a Google-Udacity partnership.

If you'd have asked me a few months ago whether I had an interest in learning to code apps for the Android platform (and learning the requisite Java code) I probably would have said it was low on my priority list. This scholarship allows me to learn the basics over the coming three months (with a possible extension of another three months as part of the full Udacity fasttrack nano degree, however, so I will certainly take the time and make use of the opportunity.

It isn't clear to me how far the course will take me, but I'm already thinking that this might be a really great opportunity to develop a version of my CoachBot language-learning tool for Android, hopefully one that doesn't require users to be online to use it.

The course so far has been fun. As usual, Udacity's platform and teaching style is highly interactive, iterates over problems and gets you solving practice questions from the start. As a language, Java is different from the Python and Javascript that I've encountered thus far, though I'm not deep enough into the weeds to have a strong appreciation of exactly how.

I've been in Amman for a few months now, and my colloquial Arabic skills are still a sore point. I now find myself speaking an odd mix of fusha and colloquial, and I'm hoping that over the next few months I can practice more and switch over, and not ask questions like (true story) "Keef keep up?"

I'm excited about working on Arabic in different ways: I'm going to be doing some work on 'Master Arabic' - Alex Strick van Linschoten's upcoming (available for pre-order now!) hugely useful new book for intermediate Arabic students to get over the roadblocks in learning and advancing in the language. 

Alex has also developed a fantastic new tool for language study called CoachBot which I'm really looking forward to using as I practice Arabic (and hopefully get back to resuming my Farsi study this year.)

So CoachBot works like a task master: you pick how much time you have -- the five minutes before you're waiting for your ride, the 15 minutes off your lunch break -- and go:

For languages that aren’t new, I often feel like I’m stagnating and get bored when I reach the intermediate levels. This can reflect a lack of materials from which to study (as was the case with Pashto when I first started studying it) or — more commonly — a surfeit of materials. This creates a kind of choice paralysis where the number of options means I’m far less likely to sit down and pick one of them. (In a similar way, I'll sometimes choose not to watch any of the in-flight entertainment because there are too many choices to pick from.)

Studying a brand new language is (almost) always fun: you’re making quick progress, everything is new so you still have that nice-and-shiny feeling, and you feel like you’re really on your way to success. Continuing that study after two to four years of effort is a little harder. Like with any longer-term project, you start having to find ways to remind yourself of why you’re even working on it in the first place. It can often feel like you’ve lost that original magic somehow, even to the extent that you question whether you actually want to learn the language.

It is useful to address some of these issues ahead of time. That way, when you hit a period of less energy or motivation, you have a pre-formulated plan of action (made by you when you weren’t consumed by whatever mood is dominant). For me, this takes the form of making lists of suggestions to my future-self. I have pre-made task lists for:

When I’m travelling

When I’m feeling sick

When I have no time to study

When I have oodles of time to study

When I have lots of energy and enthusiasm for learning

When I have no enthusiasm for learning

Try to have at least 10 or 15 tasks in whatever lists you do end up creating. Maybe save a few pages at the back of your language notebook to list these tasks. This way, you always have them handy. It helps to have a good amount of variety in the tasks you pre-assign to yourself.

I keep lists as described above, but they weren’t as effective as I'd hoped. I’d glance at the tasks, feel only a limited enthusiasm for the options available and then put the list to one side. I needed a different solution.

I happened to be teaching myself to program/code at around the same time, so I thought this might make an interesting practice problem to try to solve. (I was studying Python and so I found a way to make a web app that uses that to connect to Flask.)

CoachBot is the free tool I designed to solve the problem of study choice paralysis for language-learners. It’s still only a prototype, but I'm soft-launching it here now since I imagine it might help those reading who are in similar situations.

CoachBot gives you a task that you can complete within a specific time-frame. If you have only 5 minutes, it'll pick a random task from the database that I curated and wrote myself. Have an hour? It'll suggest a different kind of task. If you don't want to do a particular task that it suggests, just click a button to get a new one.

These are the kinds of tasks I suggest when working with students one-on-one. They’re also the kinds of tasks I had written down in my lists. As of writing, there are 386 unique tasks in the database, which means that the suggestions are far more varied and creative than anything I was previously using.

I’d suggest you use it as follows: if you ever feel like you don’t know what to do to keep going with your language studies, open up CoachBot, pick a time corresponding to your needs and do whatever it tells you to do. When you’re done, make a note of what you did and how long it took in your learning log. Consider doing another session.

I’ve been using this for a few weeks already and can attest to its value. One of the key benefits I’ve found is just in getting started. Sometimes I’ll only need to do a five-minute task before I realise that there was something else that I wanted to read or study and then I’ll get busy working on that.

There are lots of features that I hope to build in for future versions. I want to include user accounts and tracking of how much time you spend on the different tasks. I want to sub-divide by language skill (i.e. which skill is being trained) and eventually to build in some kind of guidance and interactivity to how the tool functions. But for now, use it as it is: get some studying done by outsourcing the choice of what you’ll be studying.

There are more details on the website itself. You can click through to the project’s roadmap where you can see an updated version of features coming soon. You can also make suggestions for tasks that you’d like included in the Bot and/or specific features you’d like me to build as part of the project.