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Background

After reading Becoming Fluent, I had an idea to build an app that would let students mimic immersion. I surveyed all the apps in the market and only Yabla came close to accomplishing this task. This document is a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) to test if The Idiolect Project is a compelling idea that should be polished and scaled. Some core tenets of the approach:

  1. Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Material should only be moderately more difficult than the student's present level. Watching TV and movies in the target language exceeds the ZPD. Captions may help, but the material really needs to be annotated similar to Mi Vida Loca. Watching helps comprehension but fails to engage the student beyond listening and perhaps reading captions.
  2. Students should be exposed to as many native speakers as possible. Proper exposure includes visually seeing natives speaking. Similar to exposing a young puppy to as many people and stimuli as possible, students should watch hundreds, if not thousands, of native speakers in their target language. Each video in a playlist will be uniquely different in its own way, giving the student wide topographical exposure necessary for comprehension.
  3. Students should practice speaking as much as possible. Being prompted to speak in addition to having watched natives do similar, students can mimic the native approach. The prompts should tie into emotionally relevant content for the student in as much as possible.
  4. There will not be any dedicated teachers or tutors. Reciprocity and crowdsourced content are core to the community we're building in an effort to "learn the language in a way that is as close as possible to how you will eventually use it." - Becoming Fluent pg. 155
  5. Adult students may benefit more from fellow student-teachers rather than native teachers. We evaluate and critique our fellow students so that we become a tightly enmeshed network: individual strands that together make a strong connection.

Methodology

  1. The Idiolect Project will provide the guidance, i.e. programming. We will create challenges for students to practice and complete.
  2. Students will create native content, which becomes learning material for other students targeting that language. E.g. EN (english) native will record speaking/singing the alphabet. There will be hundreds of native english speaker videos which will be available for target students to watch and listen, which will be beneficial to anyone learning English (does not matter their native language).
  3. Students will record their own version of the content in their target language. There will be hundreds of native ES (español) speaker videos saying/singing the EN alphabet. There will be hundreds of FR (french) speaker videos saying/singing the EN alphabet. Etc.
  4. Students will evaluate and critique their fellow native's submission of the target material. For a YouTube submission, a Like thumbs up is good if all is well, otherwise a comment on the video would be appropriate. Upvote good comments. E.g. "Don't forget the 'a' after using conocer when referring to people. Conozco a tus padres"
  5. The Idiolect Project will provide programming (think prompts more than scripts) for students/natives to live video chat. One student will speak their target language, and the other students will speak their native languge. In effect, one is the dedicated teacher/tutor and the other dedicated student learner.