No global success without sufficient language skills
You are working on foreign assignment. You are an expert in your field. Your success at home was one of the main reasons why you are here today – working for your company abroad. Your ability to speak and understand the language of your host country is improving. But you are in another culture now and sometimes you wonder if your clients, suppliers, and your team members really understand you at the level you’d like. That’s when you realize: the English (or French) you learned in school will not carry you through this global assignment.
So now what?
Our team has been including experienced instructors for years who teach various languages with individualized, face-to-face lesson plans. In addition to these personal classroom sessions we now also provide an online learning platform which can be used in two ways: to supplement the teacher-led learning path and as a stand-alone tool to improve professionals’ skills in English and French. The Culture Mastery is partnering with Gymglish to offer this unique language learning method.
What is it?
There is no use in developing wonderful educational and technological tools if they aren’t used. Users must feel motivated and encouraged to continue their progress. Gymglish was designed by a team of people with a variety of personalities and areas of expertise: English-speakers, French-speakers, teachers, high achievers, low achievers…
The educational team has worked hard to create a stimulating learning environment that meets users’ expectations. The goal is to make learning as fun as possible.
Fun, practical, business-related content
We decided to create scenarios for all of the content by using a deliberately humorous tone and by referencing up-to-date topics that interest all of us on a daily basis: The Delavigne Corporation – a fictional perfume company in San Francisco.
- A family-owned, multinational company.
- Different characters with a variety of accents and jobs.
- Humor and situations in the workplace.
- Stories about corporate life, its common problems, meetings, e-mails, and telephone conversations…but also the conversations around the water cooler, trips, cultural differences, and more.
Personalization and innovative technology (Adaptive Learning)
Gymglish uses an artificial intelligence engine (A9expert) that dynamically creates English lessons. Each lesson is adapted to the profile of the user: initial level of English proficiency, educational goals and ability to memorize. Users receive personalized lessons to keep them from wasting time or losing motivation due to exercises that don’t fit their needs.
IMMEDIATE CORRECTIONS: A9expert detects any shortcomings and needs through each user’s answers. It provides immediate corrections and comments along with the score of the day:
- Personalized explanations. For each answer, a personalized comment will explain why the answer is correct or incorrect.
- Vocabulary à la carte. Select the words or expressions that interest you: they will be explained in the correction, and then we will review them.
- Dialogue transcripts. The correction includes the audio transcripts and you can listen to them again while reading the text.
How it works
Level assessment – A free test includes a level assessment and a Portfolio (a personalized pedagogical report).
A personalized English lesson each morning – A daily e-mail (or push notification) meets learners’ needs for a quick, easily accessible tool that can be seamlessly integrated into their daily lives. Every morning, students receive an e-mail in English with a personalized assortment of language activities, texts and audio recordings. Each lesson takes around 10 minutes to complete and is filled with stories, dialogues, questions, ‘mini-lessons’ and revisions…. 10 to 15 minutes are all it takes to learn English effortlessly!
Answer the questions – You’ll receive a written and/or audio story about the Delavigne Corporation (a perfume company in San Francisco), full of professional situations, a variety of accents, a touch of humor, contemporary English, business English and international English.
Receive immediate corrections and comments by e-mail – After answering the questions and clicking ‘send’, you’ll receive your corrections with your score of the day, explanations of why your answers were right or wrong, the vocabulary you wanted to learn more about, transcripts of the audio recordings, and more.
Receive a new personalized lesson the next day – The following lessons will be designed taking into account your previous answers and your expectations. Gymglish will use your areas of difficulty to develop a customized lesson plan to fit your needs.
Gymglish continually adapts the content of your English lessons – Gymglish will use its artificial intelligence engine to select the story of the day according to your level of English proficiency and your personal and professional expectations. It then saves a detailed history of your completed lessons. Gymglish will develop a customized revision program so that you can review certain points at timely intervals, helping you memorize this new knowledge. Your English will get better and better over time!
Diploma & Certification – Upon finishing your training, Gymglish provides a certificate of completion including detailed statistics on progress and participation rate.
Memorization & Revision
Gymglish is the first language learning solution to take into account the impact of time and forgetfulness on the learning process. Our artificial intelligence engine (A9expert) develops the optimal revision program for each student, helping them reinforce their acquired knowledge over the long term. Our AI engine detects the learning speed and memorization capacity of each user and develops a schedule for reviewing specific points at timely intervals.
Recent theories on memorization draw on biology and experimental psychology studies to demonstrate certain characteristics of the memorization process:
- There is no point in reviewing points that the student already understands.
- It is essential to review newly acquired knowledge shortly after learning it. If not, it may be forgotten.
- By revising new knowledge at a specific point in time, the knowledge will be anchored in the memory for the long term.
The user reviews at timely intervals any knowledge likely to be forgotten. They then memorize the new information for good and their English keeps improving over time.
The key to learning successfully lies in the frequency at which we review and maintain the acquired knowledge. Going over the new information at timely intervals helps stimulate the memory and allows the student to memorize the information for good. With this innovative approach, users can learn 10 to 50 times more information in the same amount of time than when using traditional methods.
The results
About our partners
Founded in Paris in 2004, Gymglish is an independent and self-financed company offering a new approach to remote self-learning. Their aim is to achieve high participation rates thanks to fun, personalized and concise content, and to ensure consolidation of acquired knowledge. The courses provide initial and continuous level assessment based on an artificial intelligence system, and Gymglish delivers certificates of completions and diplomas recognized in Europe since 2015.
Gymglish is used today by nearly 3,000,000 people worldwide, with more than 6,000 client companies, and 100 partner schools and universities. Gymglish has since expanded its approach to two new products: The Rich Morning Show (2008, English for beginners and young students) and Frantastique (2012, French lessons).
The Gymglish team is made up of 25 people of 9 different nationalities, diverse skill sets, cultural backgrounds and sensibilities. The team works from three sites: Paris (headquarters), Tel Aviv, Israel and Florianopolis, Brazil.
If you are interested in learning more about foreign language skills and cultural competence, we invite you to sign up for our newsletter, The Culture Reflections. As a token of our appreciation you will receive a series of complimentary white papers on cultural competence from us!
Go ahead and sign up here now and we will send you the download links to the FREE white papers via email.
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