January 2007 — Features
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ESL Technologies :: The Universal Language
Messaging Technologies
Modern PCs and the web seem tailor-made for ESL applications. However, some technologies that are having an impact on ELLs were clearly designed for other purposes. E-mail and text messaging, for example, are emerging as surprisingly important media for learning English. So naturally, the importance of good writing skills is heightened.
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Witness the deal WhiteSmoke struck this fall with instant-messaging service provider ICQ to integrate its software into several of ICQ’s services, including chat rooms and forums on the company’s website. The Tel Avivbased WhiteSmoke makes online writing correction tools it calls “interactive text enrichment software” for written English. The software provides spelling and grammar correction, context- related synonym replacements, and adjective additions.
“Messaging is no longer just about writing short messages,” says Hilla Ovil-Brenner, WhiteSmoke’s chief executive officer. “It’s about sounding smart to your classmates. The potential of e-mail, online chat, and other computer messaging platforms for English language education is really incredible.”
Ovil-Brenner has a point. There are roughly 668 million e-mail users worldwide, according to market research firm The Radicati Group, and that number is quickly approaching 1 billion. Mobile phones currently account for 2 percent of active e-mail boxes, but Radicati expects that number to increase by more than 300 percent by 2009. And the company says that ICQ users, 80 percent of whom are between ages 12 and 29, send and receive 400 million messages a day.
To appreciate where all this is headed, it’s necessary to expand the definition of computer to include a swarm of untethered, nomadic devices. Software vendors have been aware for some time that the list of hardware platforms on which they will be asked to deliver their solutions will almost surely include mobile phones and PDAs, devices that are merging with digital cameras and MP3 players—both of which are morphing to add video capabilities.
“People are asking for more ways for content to be delivered,” says Pearson consultant Mark Emerson, former president of ELLIS, which was acquired by Pearson last July. “Back in the day, we delivered the program on laser disk—then CD, then servers, and now the web. Certainly, internationally, where most people experience the network—not on a PC, but on their mobile phones—they’re asking for something that can be delivered to their Treos and iPods.”
