Why a Speech-Language Pathologist Recommends InstaEnglish

Hello, my name is Mark Temenak, and I am currently a language instructor and speech pathologist at Northwestern University. I have always been interested in learning languages from a very young age and have been around others for whom English is a second language since I was born. Eventually, I became greatly interested in learning Spanish as a foreign language for my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

I then took that linguistic training to get a master's degree at the University of Illinois-Chicago in applied linguistics/TESOL for the purposes of teaching language. I then worked abroad teaching English in South Korea and then returned to Chicago to teach English at the university level, in non-profit organizations, and in tutoring sessions.

Eventually, I built on this experience to get my undergraduate degree in speech language pathology and deaf education from Utah State University and then my second master's degree in speech language pathology from Northwestern University. I have worked across many different settings and helped people from all walks of life as a bilingual speech pathologist. I now help international graduate students learn English, adapt to life in the United States, and identify and support potential students who have communication disorders.

InstaEnglish offers a unique approach to English learning, derived from the personal experiences of its founder, Yutaro, a native Japanese speaker. Back in Japan, his instructors recommended that he just speak for the sake of speaking English without any particular purpose. However, when Yutaro arrived in the United States, he realized that his practice was not actually practical since he struggled to communicate in everyday conversations. His experience was very similar to my own experiences I witnessed while being an English teacher in South Korea: speaking through highly structured, memorized dialogues that students would repeat back as best they could. However, if I asked my students basic biographical information in English outside of the dialogue, they would struggle to respond.

I have used Duolingo to learn a foreign language, but I also experienced a similar situation as Yutaro where I met someone who spoke Brazilian Portuguese and tried to have a conversation. However, I wasn’t able to use active vocabulary to fluently converse with them. While Duolingo can be entertaining to use with many aspects of the application that are “gameified” or relying on points to unlock various achievements or use them for in-app purchases, the initial lessons focus on a mix of words that are common but also not as necessary for everyday conversations.

With InstaEnglish, the overall approach is different. It gives you a target phrase in your home language, and you have to create and speak the equivalent phrase in the target language. This diminishes the time spent on receptive skills and focuses on expressive language and using the language. Not only do users immediately start with vocabulary and phrases that are the most common in English conversations, but they get immediate feedback on what went well and what needs improvement.

This feedback ranges from phrasing to individual phonemes to even rate of speech in words per minute. Rate of speech feedback can be particularly helpful in terms of intelligibility because if an individual speaks too quickly, it does not matter if they are using the correct words or phrasing. This level of feedback is much more helpful compared to other apps that mainly point out phrasing errors like words that were mistyped or put in the wrong order.

Plus, InstaEnglish is flexible and teaches that certain phrases can be said in different ways depending on the conversational context. This is reflected in the lessons that are organized into different conversational settings with accompanying target words from the 2,000 core word set.

I believe that InstaEnglish would be a great tool to help users on their English language learning journey in combination with other common methods of language practice like speaking with native English speakers and immersing themselves in the language and culture.