Vocab Express, the online foreign language vocabulary learning application has announced a brand new Version 3 to be released in stages during the course of 2015 in response to continuous feedback from teachers and students since the launch of Version 2 in September 2013.
Significant enhancements will be made to the Vocab Express monitoring and reporting tools to offer a wider range of flexible options for tracking pupil progress, including the facility to track areas of vocabulary that particular cohorts of students are finding more difficult.
The core Vocab Express learning process will also be enhanced on the one hand to allow more flexible and forgiving options around the learning algorithm for teachers with mixed- or lower-ability groups; and on the other hand with additional refinements to mitigate potential cheating by students, to add to existing measures.
Following the launch of the custom lists feature, which enables teachers to supplement their paid-for, official vocab lists with their own self-generated content, Vocab Express will be launching an updated version allowing teachers to edit and tailor these for their lessons as well as including sections from official lists. The new feature will also enable collaboration among the languages teaching community, with teachers able to share custom lists they have created.
In addition, new options will be introduced to enable teachers to vary the difficulty settings across a class of students, thus allowing a single homework to be set but differentiated by ability. A new revision mode is also lined up to further extend learning beyond the classroom, allowing students to retest themselves on vocabulary they may have found difficult to retain. Additional motivational features will include a rewards system recognising students’ individual achievements.
Better support for input for non-Roman languages such as Mandarin and Urdu will be introduced. Support for learning vocabulary and short phrases within the context of longer phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs will also be introduced.
The modular approach to the launch, which utilises an Agile Software Development method, will enable the highest priority features to be released sooner so that they can be tested by users in a classroom environment as soon as possible and then refined later in the development cycle.
All of these features will become available to Vocab Express’ subscribers with no increase to subscription rates for UK subscribers.
Justin Sycamore, managing director of Vocab Express says: “Having originally developed Vocab Express in close partnership with foreign language teachers, feedback from schools is crucial to the ongoing development and improvement of the service. We’re very excited to be offering our subscribers – both new and existing – an extensive list of enhancements which will make language teaching as efficient as possible for teachers and language learning as engaging as possible for students. I very much look forward to seeing the V3 roll-out during the course of 2015.”
February 2015
