myRead - Extensive Reading site

Description

An extensive reading site for language learners providing daily content written to different levels to enable extensive reading.

Objective

Extensive reading involves reading of lots of suitably leveled content to increase vocabulary and improve fluency. The reading must be enjoyable to the learner to sustain the volume required for improvement. When we were developing the CX project vision the concept of extensive reading was very popular at academic conferences in Japan. It is still considered an excellent way to improve proficiency in a language. As such, we decided to develop and launch custom content that was graded to each of the in-house Gaba levels (There were 10 Gaba levels aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference - CEFR) to enable clients to read extensively outside of their lesson time. The ideas was to create a news style website where learners could not only read English at their level, but also catch up on current affairs. myRead was to post fresh content daily for the learners and past content would be retained on the site for clients to browse and read.

Build

There was no need for a third party developer for this project. Our internal IT team built a news page in the internal client portal and a backend CMS for the content team to upload when it was ready. They were able to tag the articles by level and article category (sport, lifestyle, arts and culture etc.) when uploading. To grade the content we partnered with a Tokyo academic who had created an open source word profiler. We customised the profiler to identify words by our in-house levels. Writers were able to copy their article into the profiler to identify words that were out of level. Each article was written to a band (beginner, low / high intermediate, advanced) and then graded to the levels within that band (e.g. levels 1, 2 & 3 for beginner). This meant there were 2-4 seperate versions of each article at slightly different levels). In keeping with the premise of extensive reading, a small number of out-of-level words were allowed into each article to enable client progression.

Challenges

The main challenge was the creation of the content. Generally speaking however, content creation was something the content team and instructors enjoyed creating. There was some friction between editors and writers from time to time, but this is generally to be expected. There was a pull on the team’s resources in terms of time spent on content creation.

Learnings

This was a success and I would change little in taking on a similar initiative. The advent of generative AI does offer potential improvements to the one key challenge of content creation time cost.

Result

The site proved immensely popular with learners, instructors, and front of house sales staff as a tool to encourage potential customers to sign up with Gaba. Each month around 7000 of the organisation`s 20,000 client base would access the site and read an article and there would be 50,000 plus article views every month. This product was a real success and added a lot of value to the company’s offering to customers.

Reference

Project press release:https://www.gaba.co.jp/release/release140327.html