EnglishCentral Launches New Comprehensive Vocabulary Learning System

EnglishCentral Launches New Comprehensive Vocabulary Learning System

Includes tools to learn high-frequency vocabulary effectively

Nagoya, Japan – November 5, 2019. EnglishCentral, the leading provider of online English conversations solutions, announced a new suite of vocabulary learning tools at this year’s Japanese Association of Language Teachers annual conference (JALT) held in Nagoya, Japan.
The new suite of vocabulary tools were built on data collected from over 500 million learn events collected from over 1 million learners at over 5,000 learning institutions around the world using EnglishCentral.

The core of EnglishCentral’s vocabulary learning system is a library of over 14,000 authentic English learning videos, each word of which has been semantically tagged with its in-content meaning sense and which also supports multi-words and collocations.

The system includes dozens of research-supported high-frequency wordlists, including a Core Vocab* list of 2800 words, which covers 92% of words students are likely to ever meet in an average newspaper, book, magazine, TV show, movie or daily speech.

Based on the New General Service List and other lists provided by Browne, C., Culligan, B. & Phillips, J. (2013).

Unlike many vocab learning tools that demotivate students by forcing them to learn repeatedly words they already know, the EnglishCentral tools automatically mark words as known based on a diagnostic mode used when first introducing words to students to study.

Includes a state-of-the-art “speaking recall” mode, powered by EnglishCentral’s IntelliSpeech SystemSM, which tests students’ ability to recall words correctly by speaking them in context. The system also supports multiple other modes of increasing retrieval difficulty, including dictation, multiple-choice and typing, in each case with and without hints.

Supports eight different L1 languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese.

Weekly in-class vocabulary progress tests seamlessly tie outside of class study with in-class progress tests. The tests also ensure students review past words for each week’s test, as each test is based 50% on new words and 50% on review words, covering the full range of all past weeks. Research shows* that tying vocabulary study to weekly in-class tests can boost student engagement by over 100%.
Based on study by Prof. Stuart McLean at Osaka Jogakuin (2019)

Third-party assessment tests (from VocabLevelTest.Org) are used to both onboard students at the correct level at the beginning of the semester and assess students’ progress at the end of the semester.

A full suite of teacher tools allows teachers to set weekly goals for students, track the number of words students study each week, view results of weekly progress tests and quickly identify students who are falling behind on their vocabulary study.