ESL Helper

The ESL Helper Extension!
Main Screen
Lesson Screen
Test Screen
Example of procedural word testing in the browser

Inspiration

The United States has been a country of immigrants, ever since its very beginnings. And in the modern era, this is only more true, with immigrants projected to make up almost 90% of recent population growth. With over half of them not being able to speak English proficiently, it seems there is a motivation for ever more English teaching services for the influx of non-English speakers.

Meanwhile, the amount of ESL teachers in the United States is projected to decline 13% in the next decade, leading to an ever bigger discrepancy between teachers and learners.

The main inspiration for this project was the concentration of immigrants in my area, and the city of Solon. While I never experienced major problems learning English, I saw many fellow students unable to learn as effectively because of their lack of English knowledge. In light of this issue, and as an immigrant myself, I developed the ESL Helper Extension. As an extension, not only is it free, accessible, user-friendly, and convenient to anyone seeking to learn English, but it’s an entirely teacher-free, self-study method.

Design

For the design, I designed to mimic other popular vocab learning sites. I implemented several shared features:

Custom lessons for every word including pictures and questions to check understanding
Spaced repetition testing to improve memory retention

However, I also implemented several improvements to really make a constant learning environment in the browser, which is the primary benefit point of an extension:

In-browser word testing by replacing text, and asking fill in the blank questions
In-browser word recommendations
Accessible pronunciation help in the context menu

Currently, the extension has 90+ unique questions given to users.

Challenges

One of the problems I faced when creating the extension was of how to create lessons and questions for the possibly thousands of words needed to start English learning, and through this challenge I learned the usefulness of APIs, such as the dictionary API I used, to automate tasks when necessary. Still, the format of the json returned by the API was complex and a challenge to work with.

Future

Moving forward, I want to experiment with AI generation of test questions, which would create limitless possible unique questions that would greatly improve the learning and experience of the extension. Through research I've determined the Google Gemini API would be the most easy and effective way to carry this out, but more experimentation and development is a must.