Learning Intelligence

Technology that works behind the scenes to enhance our students’ learning

Learn Spanish has developed Learning Intelligence as an enhancement to our personalised teaching. It is a powerful option that further helps our students to reach their goals.

Where the student requests it, we record the lesson, and the technology analyses the transcript, producing a detailed performance report. After human review, the student receives the report, which includes summary level assessments, ratings across the appropriate CEFR elements of language, and advice as to what to prioritise for maximum impact - including at phrase-level.

Learning Intelligence in more detail

The technology is there to serve both student and teacher, based on the students’ specific learning objectives. The report that Learning Intelligence produces addresses elements such as:

  • Conversational ability: fluency, interaction, vocabulary, grammar and natural expression, assessed against relevant CEFR standards.

  • Language activation: how effectively the student turns what they know into spontaneous spoken Spanish.

  • Phrase-level feedback: specific examples of actual language used to highlight mistakes or opportunities for more natural expression.

  • Personalised development: strengths, weaknesses and recommendations for future learning.

With this, the student receives clear guidance as to how they are performing in each area. In addition, the report contains advice as to how to improve each element and what to prioritise.

With regards to the phrase-level analysis, this section lists phrases that the student used during the lesson that could be improved. This might mean error-correction or a suggestion as to how to express something more naturally or elegantly. For example:

  • 1. More natural expression

    Estoy muy emocionante por mi viaje a Colombia → Estoy muy emocionado por mi viaje a Colombia.

    Emocionante describes something that causes excitement; emocionado describes how someone feels. A common confusion between two related adjectives.

  • 2. Expressing an idea more naturally

    Tengo dos años aprendiendo español. → Llevo dos años aprendiendo español.

    Llevar + time + gerund is a particularly useful construction for describing how long you've been doing something. The original is used in some varieties of Latin American Spanish, so this is a refinement rather than a universal correction.

This feature has immediate benefit. It enables the student to fix or upgrade the specifics of their Spanish. It can also identify underlying grammatical issues so that phrase-level correction becomes structural improvement. Additionally, since all of this is handled by Learning Intelligence, the teacher doesn’t have to interrupt the flow of the lesson to address small but important issues in the moment.

Some ways in which Learning Intelligence is used

Learning Intelligence, along with everything Learn Spanish does, exists to serve students’ objectives. There are multiple ways to use it, and we will advise individual students who would like to explore the option.

It is best used flexibly, rather than for every lesson. For example, applying it to a lesson per month gives regular progress reporting as well as the ability to see trends over time.

For those students that come to us having learned Spanish using apps such as Duolingo, Learning Intelligence can be a powerful tool in assessing their capability (and potential) when it comes to using their Spanish in the real world.

Whether and how our students use Learning Intelligence is entirely a matter of individual circumstance.

Help with how to use tech more generally

We also provide guidance as to how to use chatbots as practice partners or reference resources. AI can be enormously useful, but it also has limitations. We have a lot of experience using this technology, and can advise our students as to when and how to use it to get the best outcomes.

Contact us to find out more