Words & Monsters: a review

NB This is an edited version of the original review.

Words & Monsters is a new vocabulary app that has caught my attention. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, because it’s free. Secondly, because I was led to believe (falsely, as it turns out) that two of the people behind it are Charles Browne and Brent Culligan, eminently respectable linguists, who were also behind the development of the New General Service List (NGSL), based on data from the Cambridge English Corpus. And thirdly, because a lot of thought, effort and investment have clearly gone into the gamification of Words & Monsters (WAM). It’s to the last of these that I’ll turn my attention first.

WAM teaches vocabulary in the context of a battle between a player’s avatar and a variety of monsters. If users can correctly match a set of target items to definitions or translations in the available time, they ‘defeat’ the monster and accumulate points. The more points you have, the higher you advance through a series of levels and ranks. There are bonuses for meeting daily and weekly goals, there are leaderboards, and trophies and medals can be won. In addition to points, players also win ‘crystals’ after successful battles, and these crystals can be used to buy accessories which change the appearance of the avatar and give the player added ‘powers’. I was never able to fully understand precisely how these ‘powers’ affected the number of points I could win in battle. It remained as baffling to me as the whole system of values with Pokemon cards, which is presumably a large part of the inspiration here. Perhaps others, more used to games like Pokemon, would find it all much more transparent.

The system of rewards is all rather complicated, but perhaps this doesn’t matter too much. In fact, it might be the case that working out how reward systems work is part of what motivates people to play games. But there is another aspect to this: the app’s developers refer in their bumf to research by Howard-Jones and Jay (2016), which suggests that when rewards are uncertain, more dopamine is released in the mid-brain and this may lead to reinforcement of learning, and, possibly, enhancement of declarative memory function. Possibly … but Howard-Jones and Jay point out that ‘the science required to inform the manipulation of reward schedules for educational benefit is very incomplete.’ So, WAM’s developers may be jumping the gun a little and overstating the applicability of the neuroscientific research, but they’re not alone in that!

If you don’t understand a reward system, it’s certain that the rewards are uncertain. But WAM takes this further in at least two ways. Firstly, when you win a ‘battle’, you have to click on a plain treasure bag to collect your crystals, and you don’t know whether you’ll get one, two, three, or zero, crystals. You are given a semblance of agency, but, essentially, the whole thing is random. Secondly, when you want to convert your crystals into accessories for your avatar, random selection determines which accessory you receive, even though, again, there is a semblance of agency. Different accessories have different power values. This extended use of what the developers call ‘the thrill of uncertain rewards’ is certainly interesting, but how effective it is is another matter. My own reaction, after quite some time spent ‘studying’, to getting no crystals or an avatar accessory that I didn’t want was primarily frustration, rather than motivation to carry on. I have no idea how typical my reaction (more ‘treadmill’ than ‘thrill’) might be.

Unsurprisingly, for an app that has so obviously thought carefully about gamification, players are encouraged to interact with each other. As part of the early promotion, WAM is running, from 15 November to 19 December, a free ‘team challenge tournament’, allowing teams of up to 8 players to compete against each other. Ingeniously, it would appear to allow teams and players of varying levels of English to play together, with the app’s algorithms determining each individual’s level of lexical knowledge and therefore the items that will be presented / tested. Social interaction is known to be an important component of successful games (Dehghanzadeh et al., 2019), but for vocabulary apps there’s a huge challenge. In order to learn vocabulary from an app, learners need to put in time – on a regular basis. Team challenge tournaments may help with initial on-boarding of players, but, in the end, learning from a vocabulary app is inevitably and largely a solitary pursuit. Over time, social interaction is unlikely to be maintained, and it is, in any case, of a very limited nature. The other features of successful games – playful freedom and intrinsically motivating tasks (Driver, 2012) – are also absent from vocabulary apps. Playful freedom is mostly incompatible with points, badges and leaderboards. And flashcard tasks, however intrinsically motivating they may be at the outset, will always become repetitive after a while. In the end, what’s left, for those users who hang around long enough, is the reward system.

It’s also worth noting that this free challenge is of limited duration: it is a marketing device attempting to push you towards the non-free use of the app, once the initial promotion is over.

Gamified motivation tools are only of value, of course, if they motivate learners to spend their time doing things that are of clear learning value. To evaluate the learning potential of WAM, then, we need to look at the content (the ‘learning objects’) and the learning tasks that supposedly lead to acquisition of these items.

When you first use WAM, you need to play for about 20 minutes, at which point algorithms determine ‘how many words [you] know and [you can] see scores for English tests such as; TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, EIKEN, Kyotsu Shiken, CEFR, SAT and GRE’. The developers claim that these scores correlate pretty highly with actual test scores: ‘they are about as accurate as the tests themselves’, they say. If Browne and Culligan had been behind the app, I would have been tempted to accept the claim – with reservations: after all, it still allows for one item out of 5 to be wrongly identified. But, what is this CEFR test score that is referred to? There is no CEFR test, although many tests are correlated with CEFR. The two tools that I am most familiar with which allocate CEFR levels to individual words – Cambridge’s English Vocabulary Profile and Pearson’s Global Scale of English – often conflict in their results. I suspect that ‘CEFR’ was just thrown into the list of tests as an attempt to broaden the app’s appeal.

English target words are presented and practised with their translation ‘equivalents’ in Japanese. For the moment, Japanese is the only language available, which means the app is of little use to learners who don’t know any Japanese. It’s now well-known that bilingual pairings are more effective in deliberate language learning than using definitions in the same language as the target items. This becomes immediately apparent when, for example, a word like ‘something’ is defined (by WAM) as ‘a thing not known or specified’ and ‘anything’ as ‘a thing of whatever kind’. But although I’m in no position to judge the Japanese translations, there are reasons why I would want to check the spreadsheet before recommending the app. ‘Lady’ is defined as ‘polite word for a woman’; ‘missus’ is defined as ‘wife’; and ‘aye’ is defined as ‘yes’. All of these definitions are, at best, problematic; at worst, they are misleading. Are the Japanese translations more helpful? I wonder … Perhaps these are simply words that do not lend themselves to flashcard treatment?

Because I tested in to the app at C1 level, I was not able to evaluate the selection of words at lower levels. A pity. Instead, I was presented with words like ‘ablution’, ‘abrade’, ‘anode’, and ‘auspice’. The app claims to be suitable ‘for both second-language learners and native speakers’. For lower levels of the former, this may be true (but without looking at the lexical spreadsheets, I can’t tell). But for higher levels, however much fun this may be for some people, it seems unlikely that you’ll learn very much of any value. Outside of words in, say, the top 8000 frequency band, it is practically impossible to differentiate the ‘surrender value’ of words in any meaningful way. Deliberate learning of vocabulary only makes sense with high frequency words that you have a chance of encountering elsewhere. You’d be better off reading, extensively, rather than learning random words from an app. Words, which (for reasons I’ll come on to) you probably won’t actually learn anyway.

With very few exceptions, the learning objects in WAM are single words, rather than phrases, even when the item is of little or no value outside its use in a phrase. ‘Betide’ is defined as ‘to happen to; befall’ but this doesn’t tell a learner much that is useful. It’s practically only ever used following ‘woe’ (but what does ‘woe’ mean?!). Learning items can be checked in the ‘study guide’, which will show that ‘betide’ typically follows ‘woe’, but unless you choose to refer to the study guide (and there’s no reason, in a case like this, that you would know that you need to check things out more fully), you’ll be none the wiser. In other words, checking the study guide is unlikely to betide you. ‘Wee’, as another example, is treated as two items: (1) meaning ‘very small’ as in ‘wee baby’, and (2) meaning ‘very early in the morning’ as in ‘in the wee hours’. For the latter, ‘wee’ can only collocate with ‘in the’ and ‘hours’, so it makes little sense to present it as a single word. This is also an example of how, in some cases, different meanings of particular words are treated as separate learning objects, even when the two meanings are very close and, in my view, are hardly worth learning separately. Examples include ‘czar’ and ‘assonance’. Sometimes, cognates are treated as separate learning objects (e.g. ‘adulterate’ and ‘adulteration’ or ‘dolor’ and ‘dolorous’); with other words (e.g. ‘effulgence’), only one grammatical form appears to be given. I could not begin to figure out any rationale behind any of this.

All in all, then, there are reasons to be a little skeptical about some of the content. Up to level B2 – which, in my view, is the highest level at which it makes sense to use vocabulary flashcards – it may be of value, so long as your first language is Japanese. But given the claim that it can help you prepare for the ‘CEFR test’, I have to wonder …

The learning tasks require players to match target items to translations / definitions (in both directions), with the target item sometimes in written form, sometimes spoken. Users do not, as far as I can tell, ever have to produce the target item: they only have to select. The learning relies on spaced repetition, but there is no generative effect (known to enhance memorisation). When I was experimenting, there were a few words that I did not know, but I was usually able to get the correct answer by eliminating the distractors (a choice of one from three gives players a reasonable chance of guessing correctly). WAM does not teach users how to produce words; its focus is on receptive knowledge (of a limited kind). I learn, for example, what a word like ‘aye’ or ‘missus’ kind of means, but I learn nothing about how to use it appropriately. Contrary to the claims in WAM’s bumf (that ‘all senses and dimensions of each word are fully acquired’), reading and listening comprehension speeds may be improved, but appropriate and accurate use of these words in speaking and writing is much less likely to follow. Does WAM really ‘strengthen and expand the foundation levels of cognition that support all higher level thinking’, as is claimed?

Perhaps it’s unfair to mention some of the more dubious claims of WAM’s promotional material, but here is a small selection, anyway: ‘WAM unleashes the full potential of natural motivation’. ‘WAM promotes Flow by carefully managing the ratio of unknown words. Your mind moves freely in the channel below frustration and above boredom’.

WAM is certainly an interesting project, but, like all the vocabulary apps I have ever looked at, there have to be trade-offs between optimal task design and what will fit on a mobile screen, between freedoms and flexibility for the user and the requirements of gamified points systems, between the amount of linguistic information that is desirable and the amount that spaced repetition can deal with, between attempting to make the app suitable for the greatest number of potential users and making it especially appropriate for particular kinds of users. Design considerations are always a mix of the pedagogical and the practical / commercial. And, of course, the financial. And, like most edtech products, the claims for its efficacy need to be treated with a bucket of salt.

References

Dehghanzadeh, H., Fardanesh, H., Hatami, J., Talaee, E. & Noroozi, O. (2019) Using gamification to support learning English as a second language: a systematic review, Computer Assisted Language Learning, DOI: 10.1080/09588221.2019.1648298

Driver, P. (2012) The Irony of Gamification. In English Digital Magazine 3, British Council Portugal, pp. 21 – 24 http://digitaldebris.info/digital-debris/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html

Howard-Jones, P. & Jay, T. (2016) Reward, learning and games. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 10: 65 – 72

Bliu Bliu: ‘the only company in the world that teaches languages we don’t even know’

In the words of its founder and CEO, self-declared ‘visionary’ Claudio Santori, Bliu Bliu is ‘the only company in the world that teaches languages we don’t even know’. This claim, which was made during a pitch  for funding in October 2014, tells us a lot about the Bliu Bliu approach. It assumes that there exists a system by which all languages can be learnt / taught, and the particular features of any given language are not of any great importance. It’s questionable, to say the least, and Santori fails to inspire confidence when he says, in the same pitch, ‘you join Bliu Bliu, you use it, we make something magical, and after a few weeks you can understand the language’.

The basic idea behind Bliu Bliu is that a language is learnt by using it (e.g. by reading or listening to texts), but that the texts need to be selected so that you know the great majority of words within them. The technological challenge, therefore, is to find (online) texts that contain the vocabulary that is appropriate for you. After that, Santori explains , ‘you progress, you input more words and you will get more text that you can understand. Hours and hours of conversations you can fully understand and listen. Not just stupid exercise from stupid grammar book. Real conversation. And in all of them you know 100% of the words. […] So basically you will have the same opportunity that a kid has when learning his native language. Listen hours and hours of native language being naturally spoken at you…at a level he/she can understand plus some challenge, everyday some more challenge, until he can pick up words very very fast’ (sic).

On entering the site, you are invited to take a test. In this, you are shown a series of words and asked to say if you find them ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’. There were 12 words in total, and each time I clicked ‘easy’. The system then tells you how many words it thinks you know, and offers you one or more words to click on. Here are the words I was presented with and, to the right, the number of words that Bliu Blu thinks I know, after clicking ‘easy’ on the preceding word.

hello	4145
teenager	5960
soap, grape	7863
receipt, washing, skateboard	9638
motorway, tram, luggage, footballer, weekday	11061

Finally, I was asked about my knowledge of other languages. I said that my French was advanced and that my Spanish and German were intermediate. On the basis of this answer, I was now told that Bliu Bliu thinks that I know 11,073 words.

Eight of the words in the test are starred in the Macmillan dictionaries, meaning they are within the most frequent 7,500 words in English. Of the other four, skateboard, footballer and tram are very international words. The last, weekday, is a readily understandable compound made up of two extremely high frequency words. How could Bliu Bliu know, with such uncanny precision, that I know 11,073 words from a test like this? I decided to try the test for French. Again, I clicked ‘easy’ for each of the twelve words that was offered. This time, I was offered a very different set of words, with low frequency items like polynôme, toponymie, diaspora, vectoriel (all of which are cognate with English words), along with the rather surprising vichy (which should have had a capital letter, as it is a proper noun). Despite finding all these words easy, I was mortified to be told that I only knew 6546 words in French.

I needn’t have bothered with the test, anyway. Irrespective of level, you are offered vocabulary sets of high frequency words. Examples of sets I was offered included [the, be, of, and, to], [way, state, say, world, two], [may, man, hear, said, call] and [life, down, any, show, t]. Bliu Bliu then gives you a series of short texts that include the target words. You can click on any word you don’t know and you are given either a definition or a translation (I opted for French translations). There is no task beyond simply reading these texts. Putting aside for the moment the question of why I was being offered these particular words when my level is advanced, how does the software perform?

The vast majority of the texts are short quotes from brainyquote.com, and here is the first problem. Quotes tend to be pithy and often play with words: their comprehensibility is not always a function of the frequency of the words they contain. For the word ‘say’, for example, the texts included the Shakespearean quote It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood. For the word ‘world’, I was offered this line from Alexander Pope: The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Not, perhaps, the best way of learning a couple of very simple, high-frequency words. But this was the least of the problems.

The system operates on a word level. It doesn’t recognise phrases or chunks, or even phrasal verbs. So, a word like ‘down’ (in one of the lists above) is presented without consideration of its multiple senses. The first set of sentences I was asked to read for ‘down’ included: I never regretted what I turned down, You get old, you slow down, I’m Creole, and I’m down to earth, I never fall down. I always fight, I like seeing girls throw down and I don’t take criticism lying down. Not exactly the best way of getting to grips with the word ‘down’ if you don’t know it!

You may have noticed the inclusion of the word ‘t’ in one of the lists above. Here are the example sentences for practising this word: (1) Knock the ‘t’ off the ‘can’t’, (2) Sometimes reality T.V. can be stressful, (3) Argentina Debt Swap Won’t Avoid Default, (4) OK, I just don’t understand Nethanyahu, (5) Venezuela: Hell on Earth by Walter T Molano and (6) Work will win when wishy washy wishing won t. I paid €7.99 for one month of this!

The translation function is equally awful. With high frequency words with multiple meanings, you get a long list of possible translations, but no indication of which one is appropriate for the context you are looking at. With other words, it is sometimes, simply, wrong. For example, in the sentence, Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave, the translation for ‘grave’ was only for the homonymous adjective. In the sentence There’s a bright spot in every dark cloud, the translation for ‘spot’ was only for verbs. And the translation for ‘but’ in We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving was ‘mais’ (not at all what it means here!). The translation tool couldn’t handle the first ‘for’ in this sentence, either.

Bliu Bliu’s claim that Bliu Bliu knows you very well, every single word you know or don’t know is manifest nonsense and reveals a serious lack of understanding about what it means to know a word. However, as you spend more time on the system, a picture of your vocabulary knowledge is certainly built up. The texts that are offered begin to move away from the one-liners from brainyquote.com. As reading (or listening to recorded texts) is the only learning task that is offered, the intrinsic interest of the texts is crucial. Here, again, I was disappointed. Texts that I was offered were sourced from IEEE Spectrum (The World’s Largest Professional Association for the Advancement of Technology), infowars.com (the home of the #1 Internet News Show in the World), Latin America News and Analysis, the Google official blog (Meet 15 Finalists and Science in Action Winner for the 2013 GoogleScience Fair) MLB Trade Rumors (a clearinghouse for relevant, legitimate baseball rumors), and a long text entitled Robert Waldmann: Policy-Relevant Macro Is All in Samuelson and Solow (1960) from a blog called Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality……with the Neural Network of a Moderately-Intelligent Cephalopod.

There is more curated content (selected from a menu which includes sections entitled ‘18+’ and ‘Controversial Jokes’). In these texts, words that the system thinks you won’t know (most of the proper nouns for example) are highlighted. And there is a small library of novels, again, where predicted unknown words are highlighted in pink. These include Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Gogol, Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oblomov, H.P. Lovecraft, Joyce, and Poe. You can also upload your own texts if you wish.

But, by this stage, I’d had enough and I clicked on the button to cancel my subscription. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the system crashed and a message popped up saying the system had encountered an error.

Like so many ‘language learning’ start-ups, Bliu Bliu seems to know a little, but not a lot about language learning. The Bliu Bliu blog has a video of Stephen Krashen talking about comprehensible input (it is misleadingly captioned ‘Stephen Krashen on Bliu Bliu’) in which he says that we all learn languages the same way, and that is when we get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment. Influential though it has been, Krashen’s hypothesis remains a hypothesis, and it is generally accepted now that comprehensible input may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for language learning to take place.

The hypothesis hinges, anyway, on a definition of what is meant by ‘comprehensible’ and no one has come close to defining what precisely this means. Bliu Bliu has falsely assumed that comprehensibility can be determined by self-reporting of word knowledge, and this assumption is made even more problematic by the confusion of words (as sequences of letters) with lexical items. Bliu Bliu takes no account of lexical grammar or collocation (fundamental to any real word knowledge).

The name ‘Bliu Bliu’ was inspired by an episode from ‘Friends’ where Joey tries and fails to speak French. In the episode, according to the ‘Friends’ wiki, ‘Phoebe helps Joey prepare for an audition by teaching him how to speak French. Joey does not progress well and just speaks gibberish, thinking he’s doing a great job. Phoebe explains to the director in French that Joey is her mentally disabled younger brother so he’ll take pity on Joey.’ Bliu Bliu was an unfortunately apt choice of name.