CorrectMyText.com Brings Schliemann's Language Learning Method Online

The new collaborative service will help people learn foreign languages using the method invented by German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann.

CORRECTMYTEXT.COM – native speakers will check your text in a foreign language

MOSCOW, Russia - Larnite Ltd today announces the launch of version 1.1 of CorrectMyText.com, a new collaborative service for language learners with the elements of social networking. Once registered, the user can submit a text and get it corrected for free by someone who speaks the desired language fluently. Besides, members can request a recorded version of the corrected text to practice pronunciation.

CorrectMyText.com is the effort of Dmitry Lopatin, a young scientist and entrepreneur from Russia. As a child, he read a book about the famous 19th century German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann who is famous for finding the gold of Troy and inventing his own method of learning foreign languages. To master a new language, Schliemann would read a book written in a foreign language, comparing the text sentence by sentence with the translation in his mother tongue. Then he would write texts in a foreign language and pay to foreigners to get them corrected, sometimes spending all his money. Within two years, Schliemann taught himself 15 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese.

Inspired by the personality of the scientist and his learning method, Dmitry Lopatin created CorrectMyText.com in April 2009.

To get started, the user needs to register an account on CorrectMyText, which is quick and free. Facebook users can use the site without any registration. The "Facebook Connect" button on top of the homepage enables the user to connect CorrectMyText.com with Facebook in a click. After the registration, the user can submit any kind of text: an essay, resume, letter, or a blog-post and a native speaker or someone who speaks the desired language fluently will proofread the text for grammar and style mistakes. Correcting mistakes for native speakers is easy, so many of them are happy to help with proofreading. Before submitting the text, the user can specify the level of language competence required from the proofreader, the number of checks to be made and request a recorded version of the corrected text. At any time, members can contact each other and discuss language-specific topics using the built-in mailing system. Also, users can comment on texts or corrections, discuss the content, or grammar rules.

CorrectMyText.com offers many unique benefits.

- There are thousands of native speakers who can correct the text at no cost and will do it much better than a teacher or private tutor who cannot speak the language as perfectly as the native speaker.

- The service can help bloggers or webmasters to brush up the content of a blog or website if the personal language competence leaves much to be desired.

- The user can find many new friends from around the world and share valuable cultural knowledge, which is impossible when one attends language courses, or has lessons with a private tutor.

- The user can submit a text on any topic: love, relationships, philosophy, world issues, or a text that contains slang, which one would find embarrassing to show to the teacher or private tutor.

Currently, the CorrectMyText community consists of over 1,500 registered members learning one of the ten most commonly used languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

The site also supports texts in non-Latin languages, which makes it attractive to learners who want to study Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Russian and want to find a language partner to get advice and assistance in proofreading. For the convenience of the users, the interface is localized to 10 above mentioned languages. In the nearest future, the author plans to localize the site up to 100 languages, including Latin and Esperanto.

CorrectMyText.com is a good complimentary service for people who are serious about learning a foreign language and want to get assistance from people around the world.

Visit www.correctmytext.com.


Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an EFL Teacher Trainer, Intellectual Development Specialist, author and speaker. He has written ESP, foreign language learning, English language teaching texts and hundreds of articles used in more than 100 countries. Get your FREE E-book, “If you Want to Teach English Abroad, Here's What You Need to Know" by requesting the title at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com Need a blogger or copywriter to promote your school, institution, service or business or an experienced writer and vibrant SEO content for your website, blog or newsletter? Then E-mail me for further information.

15 of the Best Blogs for EFL and ESL Teachers

Blogs are a great way to find free resources, tips, and tools from ESL and EFL teachers around the world. Here is a list of 15 of the best blogs for ESL and ESL teachers to explore:

Becoming a Better EFL Teacher - This blog provides links, resources, and tools that EFL teachers can use to improve their teaching skills. Becoming a Better EFL Teacher also features language learning news to help teachers stay up-to-date on the latest information.

English Conversation - Designed for teachers and learners, English Conversation offers resources for teaching and improving your English. Teachers can use this blog to find resources, lessons, information on learning styles, and several other useful tools.

Burcu Akyol's EFL Blog - This EFL teacher's blog features reflections, tips, reviews, and resources for English teachers. Throughout this blog, teachers can find information on EFL and ESL blogs, associations, professional development, podcasts, lessons, exercises, and teaching ideas.

My ESL Corner - My ESL Corner is a blog created to provide and share opinions, resources, and news about ESL and EFL topics to both English and Spanish visitors. Within this blog, teachers will find useful worksheets, flashcards, learning songs, clipart, e-books, readings, and much more.

English, ESL…and more - This great blog for teachers and students provides tools, tips, and resources for ESL learners. Throughout the blog pages, teachers can find classified links, writing workshops, GLBT resources, literacy links, multicultural resources, and ESL guides.

The English Blog - The English Blog is an instructive blog for English learners and teachers. The blog features Internet resources, tips, news, trivia, and reviews that can be used for English teaching and studying purposes. Just a few of the resources ESL teachers might find helpful are lesson plans, exams, reference, software, and video.

Nik's Learning Technology Blog - Nik's Learning Technology Blog was created by Nik Peachey, a learning technology consultant and teacher trainer. The blog provides teaching material, tips, and resources for ESL and EFL teachers to use new technology. Within this blog, teachers can find information on teaching English in Second Life, picture phrases, using video in language learning, animated vocabulary, and much more.

An ELT Notebook - This blog, created by an EFL teacher with over 30 years of experience, provides resources to teachers of all levels. Posts include topics on activities, career development, classroom management, lesson planning, teaching skills, and many more subjects that EFL teachers will find useful.

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day - This blog, specifically for teaching ESL, EFL, and ELL, offers daily websites that will help educators improve their teaching. Teachers can search this blog by category or browse the archive.

Blog-EFL - The Blog-EFL looks at the use of high tech tools in English teaching and learning. This language technology blog also provides tips and resources that can be used in the classroom and out.

ESL Daily - This blog, created by teachers for teachers, features information and news for ESL and EFL teaching. ESL Daily also provides resources and tips for teaching, technology, employment, and other useful resources.

ESL Lesson Plan - ESL Lesson Plan has resources, lesson plans, and tips for novice to veteran ESL teachers. This regularly updated blog also provides articles on a wide range of topics, including ESL activities, jobs, certification, lesson plans, budgeting, time management, and workplace issues.

Teaching ESL to Adults - This short and to the point blog from an experienced ESL tutor features articles on grammar, lesson plans, and other resources that teachers can use with ESL students. Teaching ESL to Adults also offers handouts, experiences, ideas, and tips.

Joey's ESL Room - Joey's ESL Room is a frequently updated blog created by several ESL teachers from across a dozen countries. This blog offers different approaches to teaching as well as information about different countries to ESL teachers and those thinking of becoming an ESL teacher.

ESL Teaching Resources - The ESL Teaching Resources blog features a list of resources and websites that ESL/EFL/ESP/EPA teachers can use with students.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about top online colleges for OnlineCollege.org.


Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an EFL Teacher Trainer, Intellectual Development Specialist, author and speaker. He has written ESP, foreign language learning, English language teaching texts and hundreds of articles used in more than 100 countries. Get your FREE E-book, “If you Want to Teach English Abroad, Here's What You Need to Know" by requesting the title at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com Need a blogger or copywriter to promote your school, institution, service or business or an experienced writer and vibrant SEO content for your website, blog or newsletter? Then E-mail me for further information.

Speaking French on the Web

Lost in Immersion: Speaking French on the Web

By KATHERINE BOEHRET

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204044204574358620977621170.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Rosetta Stone

The home page of Totale shows your learning progress and options for playing language games by yourself or with other students.

If you've ever learned a foreign language, you know the vast difference between completing workbook activities and speaking with others. The latter experience can involve sounding out unfamiliar accents or guttural pronunciations and, though intimidating, is ultimately more rewarding. By immersing yourself in a language and navigating through situations, you learn how to speak and eventually think in that language.

Rosetta Stone has long used visual learning without translations by pairing words with images —one of the ways a baby learns to speak. For the past week, I've been testing its newest offering: Rosetta Stone Totale (pronounced toe-tall-A), which is the company's first fully Web-based language-learning program. It aims to immerse you in a language using three parts: online coursework that can take up to 150 hours; live sessions in which you can converse over the Web with a native-speaking coach and other students; and access to Rosetta World, a Web-based community where you can play language games by yourself or with other students to improve your skills.

Learning a Language Online

Rosetta Stone has launched a new online program for learning languages. The program works well, if you can afford it, Katie Boehret says.

Totale costs a whopping $999, so if you aren't serious about learning a language it's a tough sell. Rosetta Stone says this program is comparable to an in-country language-immersion school. The company's most expensive offering before Totale was a set of CDs (lessons one, two and three) that cost $549, included about 120 hours of course work and had no online components.

Since Totale is Web-based it doesn't come loaded onto several disks in a yellow box like the company's previous products. But despite this digital transition, buyers of Totale will still receive Rosetta's familiar yellow box, now filled with a USB headset and supplemental audio discs for practicing away from the PC—mostly while in the car.

I've spent over eight hours learning French in Totale throughout the past week, and I have to say that I'm surprised by how much I feel I've already learned. I realized this when I spent a 30-minute car ride listening to one of the supplemental audio CDs. I mentally identified and translated practically every vocabulary word and phrase, and I repeated the words aloud with what I thought sounded like a pretty decent French accent. This was after just four hours of work online.

Rosetta Stone

Totale users can speak with a coach and three others in studio sessions.
The core of Totale is the time-intensive online coursework. But even though this takes a lot of effort, its layout is attractive and each screen has only a few things on it so it doesn't feel overwhelming. Lessons include identifying photos of objects or situations as they are described aloud, writing phrases (my least favorite part), and using deductive reasoning to construct and dictate your own sentences about a photo. Totale's headset comes in handy during exercises that require you to repeat words or sounds out loud into the microphone.
Activities in Rosetta World—including solo, two-person and group games—were addictively fun. One game plays like Bingo: I listened to someone speaking French and marked words on the board as I heard them, racing to get five words horizontally, vertically or diagonally before my opponent beat me to it. I waded into these games cautiously at first, playing alone before I got familiar enough to challenge another Totale user.

Helpful indicators show how many people are available at any given time for each type of game in Rosetta World—meaning that person is logged into Totale and studying the same language as you. I never saw more than five people in the community, and it gets a little old playing (or worse, losing) to the same person after a while. Since Totale was only recently released, this community should grow over time.

A chat window at the bottom left of the browser window reminded me of Facebook's built-in instant-messaging program, listing users against whom I competed in online games. But unlike when I'm on Facebook, I didn't feel comfortable instant messaging with these people.

No Flashcards

Rosetta Stone's methods, while natural and easy to pick up, aren't what my brain expects when learning a different language. I minored in Spanish in college, learning in traditional classroom style by studying verb conjugations on flashcards and vocabulary definitions in English. So at certain times throughout Totale's French-only lessons, a part of me wanted to know the exact definition of a phrase or the reasoning behind why something was the way it was.

The moment of truth came when I attended a real-time, 50-minute studio session online with one of the live coaches—all of whom are native speakers—and two other students (four students is the maximum allowed per class).

Rosetta Stone recommends that students complete an entire unit before joining one of these studio sessions, and the only language you are permitted to speak during the studio is the one being studied. I proudly remembered all of my new vocabulary words as our coach pointed the cursor to animals, colors and clothing, asking us questions and prompting us to ask one another questions. The coach kindly corrected us when we made mistakes, made jokes about words and used an on-screen tool to type out a few of the harder phrases.

But I fumbled around trying to remember the correct phrases and grammar to go along with my vocabulary.

I frustratingly realized that I didn't even know how to ask my coach in French, "Why is that blanc and not blanche?" Our coach eventually answered that question and some others without anyone's prompting because it was obvhous that none of us knew what forms of some words were right or why; Totale's coursework doesn't include explanations. A few of the phrases our coach explained still puzzled me and I was starting to miss my flashcards from Spanish class.

Team Effort

Rosetta Stone is determined to make sure you don't feel like you're alone as you work through the Totale program. A "Customer Success Team" representative calls you within a day of your product purchase to answer any questions or concerns about how everything works. And this team keeps calling or emailing (you tell them which contact method you prefer) whenever you have passed a milestone in the program—or to encourage you to pick it up again if you haven't logged on in a while.

Even for $999, you can go back in and re-use every feature in Totale, but only for one year. You can reset your scores and completely start over, attending online studios again and playing games in Rosetta World as many times as you like. But once a year is up, you're finished with the program.

Rosetta Stone Totale works on all major Mac and Windows PC browsers, though participating in a studio session while using some browsers requires you turn off their pop-up blockers.

I still have work to do in Totale, but I'm looking forward to it—even though I find some aspects to be a bit vague. This program does a terrific job of immersing you in a language and may be the next best thing to living in a country, surrounded by native speakers. Best of all, unlike my semester abroad in Spain where college friends gave me my daily fix of the English language, Totale never lets you slip out of using the language you're studying.

—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at
mossbergsolution@wsj.com.


Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an EFL Teacher Trainer, Intellectual Development Specialist, author and speaker. He has written ESP, foreign language learning, English language teaching texts and hundreds of articles used in more than 100 countries. Get your FREE E-book, “If you Want to Teach English Abroad, Here's What You Need to Know" by requesting the title at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com Need a blogger or copywriter to promote your school, institution, service or business or an experienced writer and vibrant SEO content for your website, blog or newsletter? Then E-mail me for further information.

Smartphones Drive Language Learning Innovation

Smartphones Drive Language Learning Innovation

By Guy Newey (AFP)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iOEPaRbHPHlDzMdLN6v4ksy8IhvA

HONG KONG — The boom in "smartphones", led by Apple's iPhone, has inspired language learning tools that would have been inconceivable just months ago -- and a Hong Kong firm is leading the charge.

Tens of thousands of "apps" -- individual programmes that can be downloaded to the phone and do everything from recognising music playing in a bar to guiding tourists around a city -- have been developed for the iPhone since it was launched in early 2007.

The ability to combine audio, video, text and data files with an Internet connection to a central website has helped create a much-improved language learning device, says entrepreneur Chris Lonsdale(pictured).

"The technology allows you to have all the elements in one place and gives you new insights (into how you can learn languages)," said Lonsdale, whose app is a six-month course for Chinese people to learn English.

Lonsdale describes himself as "expert in human performance" rather than a teacher and has given advice to clients ranging from golfers to investment bankers trying to make the best use of their abilities.

In recent years, Lonsdale -- a fluent Mandarin and Cantonese speaker -- has begun tackling how people learn languages, and developed new techniques to counter the grammar-obsessed method that puts so many people off learning.

His work resulted in a course that he says could get you to a reasonable standard of Chinese in just two weeks, and a book, The Third Ear, which combines anecdotes and philosophy with unconventional language-learning techniques.

He also developed a range of CDs that combined language learning with music, based on the idea that words can stick in the brain with little effort if they are associated with a catchy tune.

But it was when Lonsdale and his team of 12, based mainly in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, realised the potential of the new iPhone that he was able to put his methods into a single "learning machine" app, called Third Ear Kungfu English.
Lonsdale hopes it will help people shatter the preconception that language learning is about innate talent.

"Learning languages is not about talent, it is about method," said the 50-year-old.
"If you spend two years investing in learning a language and you are still at a low level there is something wrong with the way you are doing it," added Lonsdale, who learned mandarin in six months.

The new product, which his team have been working on for eight months, will target the estimated 20 million middle-managers in China, in particular those working for multinational companies.

"You have this big group of people aged between 25 and 50 who really would like to have English, who need English, but think it is too difficult," he said.

The firm will sell the iPhone or an iPod Touch (the same product but without a phone) to the firms for 5,800 yuan (850 US dollars) with the app included, which will provide a six-month course of lessons, exercises and memory tricks.
One of the features that would have been impossible on previous systems is a video of a westerner pronouncing various words in English.

Just the speaker's mouth is visible, which allows the learner to copy the way the mouth looks when it is making a particular sound -- a technique that is natural to children as they are copying from their parents, said Lonsdale.

The connected nature of the iPhone also allows managers who have paid for the device to monitor how much it is being used and how much progress the student is making. It also allows for feedback.

And every file has been encrypted so that it can only be accessed through a password particular to the user, a key factor when dealing with a Chinese market notorious for piracy.

Estimates about how many apps have been created for the iPhone vary from 15,000 to 65,000. Creators usually either give them away for free or charge a small fee to download them.

A search of Apple's online store comes up with around 1,000 options for "language learning" ranging from dictionaries and flash cards to a language suite teaching Klingon, a language used in the sci-fi TV series Star Trek.

Ken Carroll, of Praxis Language whose ChinesePod brand of online and audio learning tools has more than 250,000 followers, said the new technology offered huge possibilities, but added new products had to be carefully tailored.

"You can't just take stuff from a book and cram it into the mobile space," said Carroll, whose products teach mandarin to English speakers.

"Learning content has to be designed for the medium. It also has to be designed for the environment in which it will be consumed."


Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an EFL Teacher Trainer, Intellectual Development Specialist, author and speaker. He has written ESP, foreign language learning, English language teaching texts and hundreds of articles used in more than 100 countries. Get your FREE E-book, “If you Want to Teach English Abroad, Here's What You Need to Know" by requesting the title at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com Need a blogger or copywriter to promote your school, institution, service or business or an experienced writer and vibrant SEO content for your website, blog or newsletter? Then E-mail me for further information.