How facial expressions affect language education | John Sloan | TEDxUCD

Speaking after his TEDxUCD 2016 talk John Sloan said, “Most students of a second language never reach fluency, despite high motivation, years of study and even time spent abroad. While recent advances in technology and connectivity have led to great improvements in many areas of our lives, language classrooms have remained virtually unchanged.”
“As I outlined in my TEDxUCD 2016 talk I would like to remedy this. By viewing each and every event in the classroom as a type of game I am attempting to re-evaluate how we view the process of learning an additional language. My research is focused on a personalised web application which uses facial expressions to provide instant feedback to language students. How students change the complexity of their sentences after receiving positive or negative emotional feedback is the main point of interest. Through my research I aim to discover the best learning strategies which can be used to successfully guide all language students to fluency.”


Prior to John's enrolement as an MSc student this term, John completed an MA in linguistics in the UCD School of Languages, Culture and Linguistics, where his focus was on non-verbal communication and feedback in performance.

John is the creator of Emotional Response Language Education (ERLE), a personalised e-learning platform, that utilises facial expressions to provide language students with instant, accurate feedback on their second language production.

During a 7-year stay in South Korea, John worked as an English teacher while studying Korean. He taught at Samsung, LG and SK Telecom before opening his own academy for elementary school students. John passed the advanced TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean) in 2014.

Twitter: @ucdcompsci and @ucd_slcl

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx