E2Talks Episode 4 – The Future of Language Learning w/ Jay & Alex

In this episode, Jay talks to Alex, an E2 expert teacher, about E2School. They talk about what E2 is, who Alex is, and what the future holds for fully online language learning.

Speaker: Welcome to E2talks. It’s a podcast in which we chat about the English language landscape conversing about topics relevant to students like you. In this episode, Jay talks to Alex, an E2 expert teacher about E2school. They talk about what E2 is, who Alex is, and what the future holds for fully online language learning.

Jay:  Hello everybody, my name is Jay and usually I just say I’m one of the expert teachers here at E2language and I’m here with Alex who is also an expert teacher at E2language.

Alex: Hello Jay.

Jay: How’s it going? 

Alex: It’s great. I’m excited to be here.

Jay: Excellent. Cool. Well we’re actually not going to talk about E2language. Today we’re going to talk about E2school which is very exciting. So we’re gonna talk about what it is, why we built it or why we’re building it. We’re currently building it and we’re gonna tell you about what the courses are on E2school which are really cool and what the future of language learning might look like which I’m terribly excited about. So maybe Alex you can answer the first question, what is E2school? 

Alex: What is E2school? Well, it’s an online English learning platform essentially and what it is at the moment is a work in progress. So we’ve got a few courses that are up and a few courses that are under construction and it’s basically a sister course to our other website which is E2. It’s a sister school to E2language which is our other language platform. 

Jay: So how does E2school differ from E2language? 

Alex: Well, I imagine a lot of our listeners are pretty familiar with E2language which is the test prep wing of things. We’ve got OET, IELTS, TOEFL, PTE preparation courses on that site. Each course is a pretty substantial chunk of learning, there are heaps of activities and we have live classes, tutorials, assessments, so it’s really focused on getting people ready for their language test. 

Jay: It’s very high-level right? It’s really top of the top of the mountain. When you’re doing an IELTS test you’re at the top of the mountain

Alex: Yeah, super challenging. It’s really difficult and so what we found really is a lot of people came to that website but were probably lacking the language level to deal with those tests or to get the score that they need in those tests. So E2school was born out of that basically. People who need to really build up that foundation of English or get some remedial grammar help. So E2school is less about test preparation and more about language learning.

Jay: Right yeah. A lot of people fail those big tests don’t they, I think they have – I think some of them have like 50% failure rates, some of those high-stakes English tests –

Alex: Yeah, OET.

Jay: – I’m not going to name names.

Alex: Yeah, me neither.

Jay: [Laughter] They’re tough, they’re really tough and I think that one of the reasons why half the people fail is because they’re going completely unprepared. Do you think that’s true?

Alex:  Yeah that is true and so that’s on the one hand where E2language has a really important role to play because a lot of people just need to learn some strategies and get across the time management and the stress of a high-stakes test but there are those other people who – it’s not about strategies and tips and techniques. For a lot of people it’s about language so if you’re, let’s say, take IELTS as an example, if you’re aiming for IELTS 7 or 8 and you took the test and you got 5, it’s unlikely that a strategy is going to help you. You’ve got to deal with the problems of your language so they’re going to be grammar and vocab essentially and also familiarity with the kind of topics that you’re going to face. Tests like PTE and IELTS are very different to everyday language.

Jay: Yeah I find it – I’ve been doing this for a long time and have spoken to a number of candidates who are stuck at IELTS 5.5 on writing for example and they know the structures back to front, they understand the test back to front but that’s not the problem and you see it immediately when you see their essay. It’s just like okay, it’s grammar, it’s vocab and when speaking it’s pronunciation. These fundamental things. 

Alex: Right, it’s a bit of a bitter pill to swallow for some people. They don’t want to accept that actually there’s quite a few months, sometimes years, of hard work ahead of them to go from a band 5 to about 8. It’s not gonna happen overnight it’s probably not gonna happen in six months either so I guess with that in mind that’s where E2School –

Jay: Well it’s not gonna happen in six months in a language school right? 

Alex: That brings us to –

Jay: Yes so I guess it’s worth talking about why we built E2school and as you said, we want to help out those people who are struggling with the fundamental skills. Not just the test strategy stuff but I reckon we’ve built something with E2school that is fundamentally different, certainly different, to how you learn in a language school and I feel like we’re on the edge of building something that will transform the way people learn certainly English and what I mean by transform is I think they’re gonna learn it far more quickly and I think they’re gonna learn it far more deeply as well. It’s just gonna be much more efficient and effective language learning. Can I tell you why?

Alex: Why?

Jay: Well thank you for asking there Alex, because what we’ve done is we have the best teaching principles, like, imagine the best English teacher in the world and imagine the best course content in the world and you boil that down and you put it onto the computer and it’s super personalized. So imagine if the computer knew exactly what your deficiencies were with English like they just knew what you were weak in and knew what you were good in and that’s great but that doesn’t really matter, it needs to know what you’re weak in. So imagine if we could target those weak areas and improve your, for example, prepositions or use of articles or pronunciation of the third sound or whatever it is in your language and that’s what we’re getting to with this E2school stuff which is really exciting.

Alex: And that’s what makes it so much better than just taking an average course or buying a textbook where you’re just covering the same content as everybody else. The benefit of learning online is that it can be very personalized, tailored to your needs and those gaps that you’ve got, those gaps that are preventing your progress in language and might be preventing your test success – you can close those gaps. 

Jay: Yeah because – I don’t want to – language schools are fabulous and they’re really fun and I’ve studied languages overseas and it’s such a wonderful experience but for people who are like, let’s say, they’re working professionals, they just want to get their eye on score or whatever it is they want to do it quickly and they may not want to have the grand adventure of studying. You know, they just want to get something done, so when you’re in a classroom there’s one teacher, there’s 25 or 30 students, the teacher is teaching one particular thing. It may be too easy, it may be too hard. It’s certainly not personalized. So personalization is one aspect of E2school which is going to be radical and one of the ways that we’re going to be able to do that really, really well is by diagnostic testing. You know when you go to the doctor and your sick and the doctor takes your blood and the doctor comes back a week later, we’ll be able to do it instantly, imagine the doctor could instantly test your blood and say you’ve got this, this and this wrong with you, take this medication. That’s the analogy for what we want to do with language learning, you take a diagnostic test, it says you’re weak here, here and here. Here are the lessons that you need to do. 

Alex: So it’s all about efficiency.

Jay: It’ll make it super efficient but then also, I guess everyone’s done a bit of online learning. It’s you know, it’s the good the bad and the ugly with online learning and for language learning to be honest I’ve only ever seen the ugly. Well, some good but most of its not good. Most of its pretty bad. So I think for the first time people are going to experience language learning where they go ‘oh this actually works’. I know if you’ve used duolingo, for example, but it’s fun. Great gamification. Lots of ding-ding bonus points etc, but you know there’s lots of scientific studies now that have said that it’s basically ineffective so we want to build something that changes your brain, that gets into your neurons.

Alex: Yeah I think there are a lot of gimmicky apps and sites out there, as you said in some of them they’re fun and they’re effective to some extent but it can be hard to take that knowledge or to take that game that you’ve been playing and apply it to real life or apply it in your essay or in your speaking tests so that’s part of what our challenge has been – how do you build language? You get students to learn a grammar point, for instance, but then they walk away from the computer and they can actually use it in real life, they’re not just pushing a button and ticking a box, they’re actually producing that language which is the goal. To take that knowledge whether it’s vocab or grammar from passive knowledge into active knowledge.

Jay: Yeah and also what’s so wonderful about doing this via a computer as opposed to a textbook, is that it becomes multimodal which means you’re not just reading grammar but all of a sudden you’re hearing grammar or you’re seeing grammar through a video for example and so it’s coming at you like in real life through all these different channels. Through your ears and through your eyes. Not just reading it which is really exciting. But one of the other reasons why we’re building E2school is – and I’ve been thinking about this a lot – obviously in society there’s lots of inequalities right? There’s wealth inequalities and there might be inequalities between the genders and all this sort of stuff but there’s a massive inequality between native English speakers having an edge on everybody else who has to learn English. You know, it’s so easy for me to speak English and someone else has to learn this thing and then compete against me in the job market or whatever it is, so that’s just a massive inequality there so we want to make it easier for everyone who speaks English as a second or third language or whatever, but also one of the biggest inequalities that I find disturbing is that the level of education that people receive based on their wealth backgrounds, because if you’re wealthy you can come and study at a university English language course at a university in Australia and English language school in Australia or the US or Canada and have one of the best education possible in English but the number of students that actually are able to do that would account for less than point zero one percent. It’s a tiny percentage of the population that have the privilege to do that. So with E2school, hopefully what we’ll be able to do is provide a top world-class English language education to 99.9% of the population. 

Alex: I’ve heard you describe that as the democratization of language learning.

Jay: I like that, it’s great.

Alex: You made it up. Maybe it was me after all.

Jay: Yeah well I think I may have made this word up which is” pronunciationism” which is – well “pronunciationism” is – there’s only two ways that someone could recognize that you’re a non-native English speaker right. One is through your grammar, through your written grammar, they can see in your sentences that you write that you’re not a native English speaker. So we’ll be able to fix that through our grammar course which we’ll talk about in a second but the other one is pronunciation. We can hear that you’re a non-native English speaker and I read this study which looked at what the most light pronunciation is in the world. Can you guess what it is, which type of English is the most favored?

Alex: Surely it’s Australian.

Jay: No it was actually male British accent. It is the most beautiful pronunciation of English. 

Alex: That’s the Hugh Grant factor.

Jay: Exactly, exactly and unfortunately the least favored one was Vietnamese. I think it was Vietnamese males speaking English because Vietnamese, their pronunciation is so different to English,  it’s hard to understand, so there’s this big scale of, you know, first languages compared to – anyway. Anyway. So that has a massive bearing because let’s say you’re a Vietnamese student, you study in Australia and you’re in a job interview and you’re struggling with your pronunciation. Huge discrimination factors there, right. It’s just unfair. This person might be really competent but – anyway.  So we’ve built a course for that called Speaking Lab so it might be worth talking about it.

Alex: Yeah, why don’t we get on to the courses that are up on E2School. So do you want to start by telling us a bit more about pronunciation and Speaking Lab, the course.

Jay: Yep so right now we’ve got – well there’s sort of three parts to pronunciation. You can think about the first level is what’s called phonemes or the sounds of English and there are 44 sounds like ‘beh’, ‘keh’, ‘meh’, whatever they are.

Alex: The dreaded ‘th’. 

Jay: Yeah and so we’ve currently covered that which is really good. The second level which you can think about is consonant clusters which when the sounds come together like ‘Kur’ and ‘brer’ and ‘dreh’.

Alex: It’s a real challenge for some languages right.

Jay: Oh yeah and let’s say you’re a Thai speaker some of these sounds come perfectly natural to you, some of them are incredibly difficult to say because they’re so unnatural because they just don’t exist in your language. So that’s the second level and then the third level on top of the sounds and the clusters are like the rhythm of the language, the intonation, the word stress or connected speech. That’s when you put it all together. So we’re slowly building this out it’s called Speaking Lab and that’s going to be a really cool course and what you’ll be able to do with this course is because only some of these things are relevant you don’t need to study all 44 sounds. What you can do at the beginning of the course is put in your first language, let’s say it’s Arabic, and it will tell you the exact things that you need to study because you’re an Arabic first language speaker.

Alex: Again, very efficient. So pronunciation is one of those things I know as a ex-classroom teacher and among my colleagues, a lot of teachers are really reluctant to deal with it. One because they don’t feel confident themselves but the other reason as you said is that everyone in that class has got completely different problems so you’re not going to spend an hour working on the distinction between L and R when for 80% of the class, it’s no problem, whereas for that other 20%, as you said, that’s a huge barrier to them in their communication and if they’re going for jobs, applying for things they need to deal with that issue to overcome their communication barrier but it’s it’s hard to do in a classroom, so online it’s a much better way. 

Jay: I would say it’s almost impossible to do in a classroom. If you have a mixed background of students you’re not going to satisfy everybody, you can’t, let alone actually teach pronunciation which is really hard to teach right.

Alex: Yeah I think teachers are not really trained that well in how to actually teach pronunciation and as you said there are different layers to it so you might know the phonemic chart but can you really teach that effectively and then on top of that are you going to deal with connected speech? There’s a lot behind it and it’s all very individual based on the mother tongue.

Jay: Yeah so just a couple of things lastly on Speaking Lab is yeah, the first language thing is super important but the second thing that we have in Speaking Lab which is pretty radical is some artificial intelligence. A little robot is in the computer that can give you automatic feedback on your pronunciation. So you might say a word or a sentence and you click Submit and within a second or two it tells you precisely what you’re mispronouncing then –

Alex: – based on a male British accent?

Jay: It’s actually a sort of hybrid between American and British which is interesting yeah. Do you want to tell us about Test Ready?

Alex: Yes I would love to. So Test Ready is one of the other courses that’s up on E2school at the moment and this course is the biggest link to E2language. This is a course that came about after we saw that a lot of students were struggling with PTE, IELTS, TOEFL and we felt like there’s a missing link for them or there’s a missing course. So they might have been aiming for IELTS 7 and they scored IELTS 5.5. Students like that, there is general English available to them but a general English course is not that relevant if you’re someone who’s planning to take IELTS or PTE to immigrate or to get your profession recognised or get into Uni, something like that. So you don’t want to learn how to go shopping and how to book a movie ticket. Those things are not super exciting to you so the Test Ready course is built around the topics that people are going to face in high stakes language tests and they draw on the tasks that come from PTE. Things like gap-fill listen and repeat, writing essays of course from IELTS tasks like true, false, not given. So these would be familiar if you’ve been preparing for a language test but the level of the content is a bit lower, a bit more accessible, a bit more manageable. So you would hopefully pop out the end of a Test Ready lesson with a huge bank of vocab that you’ve repeated over and over through the course in different contexts, throughout the lesson rather. As well as that, you’ll have more confidence, you’ll be across a bunch topics and one of the first lessons we made was the crime one and that came from.

Jay: I actually wrote an essay on crime once in the IELTS test, on jail times or something.

Alex: Yeah well in my experience having been an IELTS teacher for a long time, I know that whenever we came across that topic crime, everyone in the class was freaked out because for some reason they have almost no language to talk about crime.

Jay: They weren’t criminals obviously.

Alex: Well it’s hard to know. In some cases… but after a day of two of working through some material readings and stuff, listening to some stuff, talking about crime, suddenly if they go to a language test and they get your topic about jail time they’re much more able to deal with it but without that lesson when are they ever going to learn – if they’re not a criminal – when are they ever going to learn that language? You’re not talking about it at work, you’re not really dealing with it in a general English course, so we build the course from the knowledge of what students are lacking and trying to present it to them in a palatable way that’s not exactly test preparation, but it’s not general English, yeah, it’s fun, it’s interesting. The topics are engaging and the live classes too. We sort of extend from where they can – let’s say there’s a lesson on lab-grown meat. You learn about that. That’s the whole thing. They can. Anyway, so there’s a Test Ready lesson on that. In the live class we go through all that vocab again, we extend the vocab and we deal with a similar topic. So what I mean is the live classes they’re really supplement what they’re doing in their own time on Test Ready. So it’s kind of a gateway to the test but also a booster for those who are preparing for the test. They’re going to build up their language and topic knowledge and – yeah, it’s like a turbocharge.

Jay: There’s live classes. They’re pretty amazing actually aren’t they? Zoom just did a case study on E2language because we’re using their technology so well. They actually published an article about us, E2language. Yeah because I really, you know, I think these live classes that we’re delivering on E2language which we will soon deliver on E2school, they’re great, they just you know log on from wherever you are in the world, there’s the fantastic teacher with the fantastic material and yeah, it’s a great way to learn, very motivating, engaging, etc.

Alex: Yeah I think it also that’s what makes the platform E2language and E2school different from just learning language online because you do have a real teacher available to you and in the live classes you can come along ask your questions, you can chat with other students in there, so it’s a really good blend of real life and virtual life. 

Jay: Yeah isn’t it? Now what about you as a test preparation expert, what’s your background? You were an IELTS examiner right?

Alex: Yeah I was until the start of this year. 

Jay: How long did you do that for?

Alex: For about 10 years. So I was a writing examiner and then a speaking examiner for most of the time.

Jay: How many essays do you think you’ve marked? 

Alex: Couldn’t count. Thousands and thousands of speaking tests I would imagine, that many, yeah, ten years, it was a pretty long time.

Jay: So you feel qualified to be writing this Test Ready course?

Alex: Yeah I think I’ve got a very good insight into – I think as an examiner you really see – it’s interesting because you’re marking tests from people all over the world but it’s amazing how much everybody seems to make the same mistakes. There’s really like a top five error list which is what we deal with in E2language, but, yeah, you sort of get to see that there are gaps in people’s grammar and in people’s vocabulary and there are just deficiencies that a lot of people share. But I was also an IELTS preparation teacher for a long time so from that angle I also saw – I think that gave me a lot of empathy as an examiner because I saw the struggle of these students and just the devastation if they miss their score, the elation when they – but I understand that something like PTE, OET, it’s an absolute life changer for people. They call it a high stakes test and it really is, it has such high stakes and I think being a teacher, you can really see how important the test is and it gives working at E2language, E2school, gives me the chance to bring in the material that I know is good, the content I know is good and just scrap all that other stuff. You know if you’re at a language school teaching a curriculum as a teacher you would know 80% of this is rubbish but I’ve got to teach it, it’s written in the curriculum whereas we have the freedom to draw on not just me, but our team of experts and ex-examiner’s. They know what works and we’ve got a great chance to share it with people.

Jay: Brilliant, cool.

Alex: So should we talk grammar?

Jay: Yeah, yes of course.

Alex: I know it’s your favourite topic

Jay: It’s my favourite thing.

Alex: Tell us about it.

Jay: Grammar is really what – it’s just hard to learn in general and it’s super hard to get right on the computer. There’s basically nothing out there – I’ve never seen anything that works on the computer, on the internet for grammar. But until now. Well, one of the courses we have is called Grammar Review and it’s pretty much a strict grammar course. What it does is it takes you through all the different parts of speech or the types of words in English like verbs and nouns and adjectives and articles and adverbs and conjunctions, etc. But does it in a really clever way where again you’re not just reading grammar but it’s coming at you through listening, it’s coming at you through reading, you have to write it, all this sort of stuff and it’s also taught to you, you’re not teaching yourself like you would through a grammar textbook which are impenetrable and impossible to read. We have lovely teachers telling you very simply how these structures work.

Alex: Real-life teachers.

Jay: Real human beings, yeah. So that’s a cool one. That’s a really nice one if you just want to get your hands dirty with grammar and fix up some of your mistakes. 

Alex: So if someone’s low like elementary level they could use it or someone at an advanced level?

Jay: I think they have to have a pretty good grasp of English to use that course, so it’s more built for this sort of IELTS 5.5 up to anywhere up to eight or nine even, but we do have some courses for the low levels like beginner. Not quite beginners, let’s call it low intermediate and then intermediate and then upper intermediate I think would be a good way to describe that and those three courses – or you could think about them like general English. So if anyone out there who’s studying on E2language has some friends and cousins, some nieces and nephews, put them onto E2school because they can start to build their English language learning now because you got these really cute fun courses and what these general English courses are, is tied to other Cambridge English tests. So you don’t even know it,  you’re studying general English and improving your vocabulary and your grammar and your pronunciation, etc, but at the same time you’re actually preparing for the Cambridge Key Test.

Alex: Accidental test preparation.

Jay: It’s pretty clever. – or the Cambridge Preliminary or the Cambridge First which, sure, I mean that’s fabulous, I mean if you’re an eighteen year old or 20 year old or whatever or even later you can go and take one of these Cambridge tests and it looks fantastic on your CV when you’re going for a job to say that you got X score on the Cambridge First or Cambridge Key or whatever and the way that we teach this online through these online courses, again it’s really fun, it’s really interactive, it’s really engaging, its supplemented by live classes so it’s motivating. We’ve got some good ingredients there.

Alex: And will students be able to get their work assessed?

Jay: Yep, as part of the paid language learning package you can have your speaking and writing assessed by our expert teachers and get some feedback which is really critical. Yeah, they’re gonna be fun. I wish that I could do these courses in my second language which is Indonesian. I would love to have a nice online course for Indonesian but it doesn’t exist yet, so get your friends and family onto that one that’ll be cool. I think one of the missing pieces of the puzzle that we haven’t got and which we’ll have to do is vocabulary. Do you have any vision for that in your mind?

Alex:  This is something that we talk about all the time and I’m always reading about what’s the best way to learn vocab and this is the question at the end of every live class somebody asks – how do I improve my vocab? or can you send me a list of vocabulary which to me is the biggest waste of time to download a list of vocabulary. But I think this is something that we’re working on and we’re dabbling in it, in Test Ready, like it’s definitely a matter of repetition, it’s a matter of personalization, recontextualization like how do you get somebody to learn a new word and that word is actually going to be of use to them? They’re going to know it when they read it, they are going to say it in a conversation –

Jay: – understand when they hear it?

Alex: Yeah, so there’s a lot of levels to it and there’s differing research, some that say you have to meet a word 17 times but before you know it, others that say you have to meet it 50 times, some up in the 70s, so yeah, I think there’s definitely scope for a course which is just about vocab.

Jay: Do you think it would be a phone app, lend itself to a phone app better so they can do it on the train or the bus?

Alex: Yeah, definitely. Definitely and I think it’ll come down a bit to – I mean they’re other vocab apps already but they just don’t go that extra step of bringing that vocab into your active language. So it’s all quite passive. You’re just playing games and you might recognize the word when you see it but it’s never gonna come out of your mouth in a language test, you’ve got to – 

Jay: You’ve got to say it, you need to hear it.

Alex:  Yeah, so I think that’s something on the horizon for us and I think it would be great value to all language learners. Not just Test prep.

Jay: I mean, for sure, I mean vocabulary is the building blocks. You can’t just have grammar because it’s just rules. Rules with no words is useless, but even if you go to another country and you just have vocab you can at least get around. it’s the best starting point.

Alex: Yeah and there are things that exist like the academic word list which everyone would agree is sort of the essentials to deal with academic texts and content but a list of words is just not useful. It has to be more than that. I think ‘yeah that’s the challenge for course builders like us’.

Jay: Yeah, one of the interesting bits of research that I’ve seen on vocabulary is high frequency word lists. So it turns out that the top 500 words in English, for example, account for something like 80 percent of the use, so there are theses certain subsets of words that are just extremely common so that’s a good starting point. You probably want to start at least if you’re a beginner or lower intermediate with common vocabulary. The problem is with this subset of words is that a lot of them are grammatical words like ‘the’ or ‘to’ or ‘of’, for example, which don’t really have any meaning and a lot of the verbs in there are all irregular. This is just complexity, anyway, we have to deal with this problem and make it easy for the learner but language is so complex that it’s just a minefield of complexity. But, yeah, it’s pretty cool. We’ll get there with that app I think it’ll be really good.

Alex: And so speaking of the future, what’s next in language learning in online learning? For E2?

Jay: Alright, so I think at some point somebody’s going to build some technology that is going to transform the way people learn languages. Nobody’s done it yet, people have dabbled, there’s been a few little breakthroughs but no one’s pulled it all together, all the different parts of language, vocab, grammar, pronunciation, reading, listening, writing, test preparation into one platform, in a way that works. I think whoever does that first is going to own the space. Also it’s one thing to have a platform in a self-study platform, a lot of people are very self-motivated and they can do that, a lot of people aren’t and a lot of people like to go somewhere to do something like, for example, I go to the gym, not that you can tell, but the reason I go to the gym is because I’m motivated when I’m at the gym. Everyone else is working out and I’ve got my runners on and I feel like working out as well, I just don’t do it at home, right, so people like to go places to do stuff.

Alex: So there’s accountability?

Jay:  Yeah there’s accountability and there’s just sort of something nice about being surrounded by people doing the same thing right. So I think language schools aren’t dead they’re not going to die but I think they’re going to revolutionize. I think they’re going to transform and the way they’re going to transform is it’s not going to be teacher to many students. It just doesn’t work well. It doesn’t work well and it’s never worked well. I think what’s going to happen in the future is you sit down at the computer and it says ‘Hello Alex, I know exactly what you need to work on today, you’re weak in this, this and this, here are the perfect multimedia multimodal interactive lessons that you need to do’ and you do them and there’s a teacher there, but the teacher is not teaching you, the computers teaching you and it might be one of us from our Melbourne offices, for example, live-streaming through to you.

Alex: So the teachers are virtually there?

Jay: They’re virtually there and totally cool but there are these people around the room called guides or assistant teachers, I guess, and you can raise your hand if you have some confusion either with the system or with the particular a bit of language you’re struggling with so you say ‘excuse me, can you please explain this a little bit more’ and then they explain it and then you’re back into the computer system and away you go. 

Alex: So the best of both worlds. The traditional classroom plus futuristic technology.

Jay: Yep that’s it. Teachers are fantastic. You need teachers. They’re great. They’re never going to go away, but their role is going to change significantly, which by the way is going to be a relief for teachers because teaching is so hard right? You’ve done it, I’ve done it. Trying to teach a language class to 30 students who have all differing levels, different first language backgrounds. Plus teaching English, you’re not just teaching English, you’re like a master of seven different subjects pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, listening, you know, it’s so tough. I’d be a math teacher any day of the week rather than an English teacher.

Alex: Not me.

Jay: I tried it once, it wasn’t very good.

Alex: But people, still, as you said, they like to have someone available to them when they’re studying, someone in the room or somebody on the screen, whatever it is. Someone who’s there for immediate help. So if I have a question someone will answer it straightaway. There’s still a demand for that.

Jay: Totally and I think these sorts of language learning schools, let’s call them future language schools driven by technology, are going to be super popular in countries where English is not the first language. So imagine being in Ho Chi Minh City, for example, going to the Future language school sitting down, having native English speakers teach you, you’ve got your Vietnamese English teachers to help you when you’re stuck, you’re being provided the best possible English language education, there’s no restrictions. I think it can be really cost-effective, it’s not going to be expensive, it’s gonna be the technology where it’s scalable because we can have one teacher from Melbourne live streaming across to 5,000 students all at the same time. This is this is where we want to go eventually with E2school after we’ve developed all the software and we’ve really worked it all out. I think we want to start building a few of these schools.

Alex: And obviously so much cheaper for the student than a trip to Australia to uproot their life for their family for two years but still getting a quality education.

Jay: Yeah precisely. It’ll eliminate that discrepancy between the rich and the poor I think in terms of providing education that they want.

Alex: Watch this space.

Jay: I’m a little bit excited, yeah, anyway it’s been – I should just say this isn’t just all fantasy, we’ve been now – E2language has been doing this for eight years E2language and we have a vast knowledge of how to do it, there’s a lot of different experiences with the technology, with the language learning methodologies, with the content writing, with the online teaching, we’re pulling it all together. Anyway, I think that’d be a good place to end the podcast.

Alex: Yes on an exciting hopeful note like every good essay should end.

Jay: But everyone should go to www.e2school.com and check out the website and sign up and certainly let everyone know and your Facebook page and your peer group, let them all know that they can study English – well a lot of its going to be for free, there will be some paid courses, but, yeah, check it out for yourselves.

Alex: Yeah, we’ll see you there 

Jay: Cool. Thanks, Alex. 

Alex: Thanks Jay.

Speaker: Thanks for listening to E2talks. Remember to check out e2school.com and choose one of our courses on tests skills, pronunciation, grammar or general English language learning. Thanks.