Habr, meet - new LinguaLeo with a personalized system of learning a foreign language

We see personalization in the future of education, because each person learns at his own pace and pursues a personal goal. Someone prefers to engage in one material, and someone - on the other; Someone has time to study during the day, and someone has an evening. Our team worked hard for almost a year to take all this into account and to provide its users with the opportunity to learn English according to their personal plan. So, we are happy to announce the New LinguaLeo ! The new version of the service for each user is represented by an individual training plan, which is displayed on the new Dashboard, as well as interval training and UGC translation.

The tests of the new system have already shown the effectiveness of the new format - the involvement has grown. Now Sasha, the brother of your friend and future graduate, will prepare for the EGE only on the materials that will be useful and interesting to him. Travel lover Valera, at last, will be able to say to the airport employee: “What's your charge for excess baggage?”, And your favorite girlfriend, beauty surgeon Tamara from Ufa, will understand what her colleagues are saying at an international symposium.
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A rather simple-looking system “under the hood” hides technologies that are not found anywhere else, as Artyom Loginov says, our VP of Product. If we managed to intrigue you - go under the habrakat, there you will learn the details about our know-how.

Innovations affect both new users who have just registered, and those who already have an account on LinguaLeo. Those who love the resource for some of the individual functions (personal vocabulary, training, downloading and studying their own materials in the "Jungle", etc.), can rest easy: everything is still available.

To launch a new Dashboard, you need to go through several steps: fill out a short questionnaire, go through two adaptive tests, lexical and grammatical, determine the goal. In order for the service to launch a new recommender algorithm for you, you will need a maximum of 15 minutes, during which you will learn your level of English and receive personal advice on improving reading, writing, listening, speaking. The program will analyze your language level and interests in real time based on two adaptive tests and a completed questionnaire.

So let's go! Fill out the form

We ask our users to tell a little about themselves by filling out 4 points of the questionnaire, including age and gender; the time the student is prepared to spend on the site on a daily basis; skills assessment (reading, writing, speaking, listening comprehension); interests

Testing

After the questionnaire, the student will have to find out his literacy level through adaptive tests. The grammatical test, which we have already written , was added lexical. The latter evaluates the student's vocabulary.

Check how many words you know

Our experts have built an algorithm to identify the 14,000 most frequent words of the 350,000 actual texts present in the “Jungle”. Such a number of words is enough to achieve all the goals in learning the language that the user can put on LinguaLeo.

For a quality test, the set of the most popular words was ranked and divided into 15 samples, and they, in turn, into 3 difficulty groups. Each sample included 200 words of similar frequency. When a new attempt is made, the user receives a task for a test consisting of 10 random words from each sample, which reduces the possibility of memorizing vocabulary in the test itself. First, words from the medium difficulty group are displayed, then, depending on the answers, the test becomes more difficult or simpler. In the process of passing, depending on the answers, part of the words or whole samples of the 15 formed ones can be skipped if a major inconsistency of complexity is revealed to the level of the user. Then the student goes straight to an easy or complex group of words. The fastest passing of the test - for the 60 first answers I “remember”, and the longest - for 100 mixed answers. The vocabulary is calculated depending on the percentage of knowledge / ignorance of words in each sample.

It's time to decide on purpose

Our methodologists identified 5 classes of goals that a student can aspire to.
- Increase knowledge (from elementary to proficiency)
- Exam preparation (GIA, EGE, TOEFL, IELTS, ENEM, CAE, FCE)
- Improving certain skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening comprehension)
- Achievement of personal goals (reading literature, watching films in the original, free communication on trips, business correspondence)
- Professional growth (English for IT-specialists, for marketing, for lawyers, veterinarians (!), Pharmacists, engineers and professionals from other areas ).

Objectives are directly related to the assessment of skills that the user has given in the questionnaire earlier. Some goals may be closed to the user if the system considers that he has already “outgrown” them.

Follow the recommendations and move on to the result!

After the user specifies the goals, he receives instructions on how to work on the new platform to achieve the desired results. Then we send it to the Dashbord page with five tasks. Among them, the system offers video and training "Brainstorm", the study of sets of words, texts. (screenshot) You can refuse any task by specifying the reason. Subsequently, this material will not appear in the tasks. However, it will still be available in the "Jungle" when searching.

Following the recommendations received, in real time the user monitors the progress of each of the skills. In the sidebar, he sees the current achievements, and in the pop-up, how many points of experience he gained for each skill, how many are necessary to go to the next level, and what level it should be to be at the goal. When fulfilling the norm of the day, the student receives one or another bonus depending on the length of the series of classes. There is no limit for classes during the day. You can follow the progress in the user-friendly magazine, which is now available in the left Dashboard.

Having gained enough points to move to a new level with a certain skill, the user should overestimate it. He re-passes one of the tests or again independently puts down the knowledge of the skill (reading, writing, speaking, listening comprehension) from 1 to 7.

We have foreseen a situation in which the user does not reach the desired level during the first revaluation. In this case, the student continues to study, but now he will have to score 1.5 times more points than was originally required to go to the next step. With each unsuccessful attempt to improve the performance of skills, grammar and vocabulary, the personal ratio of the number of points needed to move to a new level will increase by 0.5. For example, if 5000 points were initially required to improve the “reading” skill, then after an unsuccessful re-evaluation, an additional 2500 points would be needed, and in the next stage the coefficient will remain. To reduce the personal factor can be due to the successful revaluation of knowledge from the first time. Thus, the program adapts to the user's individual pace.



At any time, the user can change the goal, the intensity of employment and interests - the system will adjust to it. At the same time, one can still study separately for any courses, video, audio and texts, and memorize words in training sessions using a personal dictionary.

We also have other new features: UGC translations of sentences and interval repetition training of vocabulary based on the Ebingaus forgetting curve. We will write more about them in our next article.

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