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PROVO — Movies have long been touted as a great tool for studying foreign languages, but a new program from Brigham Young University has made the experience even more interactive.
With Ayamel, a language learning platform, students can click on movie subtitles to look up words in dictionaries and search for how terms are used throughout a video. There are about 1,700 videos in the system so far, including feature films, according to Michael Bush, associate professor of French, instructional psychology and technology. He has been working on Ayamel for about four years.
“We would say just watching movies is a very powerful technique for language learning, but adding to it the ability to see the text, make the sound-symbol correspondences and then look up words to get the definition — it is even more powerful,” he said.
Transcripts of the videos are imported into the system so users can interact with what is being said on-screen while the film is streaming online. When a student clicks on a word in the text, the program pulls up definitions from BYU sources and other online dictionaries. Users can also click on the transcript to jump to different parts of the movie.
Ayamel is operational and so far several classes at BYU and a college in Iowa have been using the program, according to Bush. He said other institutions have expressed interest in Ayamel, but the program hasn’t been opened up yet.
He said his students absolutely love the program. He has been using Ayamel in one of his conversation classes on a limited test basis for about two years.
“There are things that make movies a very powerful medium,” he said. “A lot of what we do is based on the idea that people understand the world in terms of stories they’ve already understood. We like to tell stories, and we like to be told stories. This is just part of our humanity, but it’s even more than that — stories have a lot to do with how our minds work, and what better medium is there than video for conveying stories? That’s one of the reasons we’re excited about (this program).”
Ayamel is still in its final stages of testing, but Bush said there are opportunities available for those who want to work on their advanced Arabic, advanced Chinese or beginning Romanian. A beginning film in Turkish is also close to completion. Those interested in gaining access to the test courses can email arclitelab@byu.edu.
Bush envisions that someday Ayamel could become a crowdsourcing site, with users contributing their own films to the system. Some videos on Ayamel are streamed through YouTube, while others were created at BYU. Feature films are password-protected for only students to access, due to copyright restrictions.
Watching movies outside of class gives students a head start, according to Bush.
“Movies then become the source information for what students are learning,” he said. “They can work with those outside of class and when they come to class, they’re able to do some pretty interesting things with the teacher.”
Ayamel is funded by The Language Flagship, which is part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Education Program. It was also created in partnership with the American Councils for International Education.
