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In an age where information flows freely, language is still one of the biggest remaining barriers to global collaboration. For students and professionals around the world, fluency in a “world language” (English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish among others) can open up world’s of professional and intellectual opportunities, and lack of these skills can keep residents from being able to tap into the wealth of knowledge available on the web.

Bridging The Gap

Unfortunately, driving home this idea can be hard, especially in parts of the world where economic conditions make it difficult to see the immediate benefits of learning a second language. Researchers at the University of Berkeley are spearheading a program to try to improve this situation.

It’s called MILLEE and it stands for Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies. Once you swallow the acronym, what you are left with is a program that combines language learning, mobile technologies and games. After looking at rural India (their test case), they noticed two interesting trends: members of low-income populations were much less likely to complete language education, but just as likely to have mobile phones.

What they hypothesized was that by making language learning more interesting, and allowing students to take their lessons with them anywhere they choose, they could encourage these students to pick up vital language skills. With this in mind, they developed a set of games based on the PACE framework. Most of these games were simple, ranging from crossword puzzles to hangman and all of them were designed strictly for mobile devices.

There were a few bumps in the road.

As it stands, their software only works Motorola Razr V3m phones, which is limiting in a world where less expensive mobile phones are common. Another more subtle problem was that the first set of games were based on traditional, Western video game models, and the Indian students using them found them to be confusing. After studying the ways that these students played the games, new sets of software were developed which proved to be much more successful.

From their initial trials, the researches discovered statistical improvements in language understanding and more importantly substantial improvements in student’s engagement with the material. The program isn’t perfect, they discovered that cell phone learning is not great at teaching more complex tasks like creative writing and many of the students had to be taught how to use the phones involved in the program.

Still, they are happy with the results that they have seen thus far, and they plan on expanding this program in the future. Most recently, the researchers have received a grant from Verizon to use their program to help teach English to Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States. They hope this and technologies like it could prove valuable for other areas and other languages in the future.

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