MoviEng

From 2011 to 2012, I worked as an instructor at a language institute in South Korea, teaching TOEFL (Test of English as Foreign Language) and English Pronunciation. While teaching students, I found that many students had difficulties with improving their English speaking. There were several issues. But the biggest one was that they did not practice saying out loud and repeating the expressions, which are necessary for building muscle memory and fluency. I encouraged them to speak common expressions repeatedly until they could say them naturally, i.e., without thinking. But I sensed that encouraging them to do so was not enough to motivate them to practice in this manner.

After this experience, a question always lingered in my head. “How can we motivate students to practice speaking?” A few years later and as I was thinking about what to do for my course project, I remembered this question. I asked myself, “when do I enjoy practicing particular expressions (or lines)? when did I start doing that?” Then I realized that I enjoy imitating actors from iconic scenes in the movies. I imitate their words. Their tone. Their gestures. I become these characters for fun.

From there, one thing led to another, and I designed and developed MoviEng (= Movie + English). It was downloaded by thousands of users. MoviEng used YouTube and Google Speech API. YouTube API for videos; Google Speech API for speech-to-text, which was used to check whether a user correctly said (and pronounced) the line. If the accuracy was above a certain percentage, the movie played the next part of the scene (i.e., the next character’s lines) to provide the impression that the user is, in fact, interacting with a character in the movie.

See the demo below.