Oracy + Literacy = Growing Proficiency
Kyle Larson
CEO @ AIR Language | Connecting people with Quality Language Instruction & Tech
Throughout the history of our company, we have devoted ourselves to creating content and features that have real meeting within the classroom. What I mean when I say that, is that most of the tools teachers receive from curriculum creators in textbooks are left used in the classroom. Our mission is to create tools that actually matter--that teachers truly use and students truly benefit from. And this is why we went out on a limb to create what is majorly missing in the English language classroom: content that complies with orthodox theory and language acquisition as well as usability in the classroom, and simple features with big impacts.
I only have enough space in this newsletter to begin talking about all of the textbooks that were purchased for my classrooms, with pages of directions that I was to read aloud in front of the class, or books on topics that were "cool" but had nothing to do with students' lives. People are dying to move from expert opinions and research based but not field tested materials. Teachers are tired. They need practical tools.
At AIR Language, we began dreaming of structures and content that result in real growth for every student in the classroom. And the new features we are announcing in this newsletter will do just that. We have been consulting for months with teachers and students about exactly what they want and what they will use in the classroom. Our offerings are rooted in theory and practicality.
This is the wave of the future and we are riding on top of it.
Free AIR for All
The first thing I want to mention is that air language is free if you would like to use it in your classroom, or, if you would just like to play around with a cool new tech toy. I would love to hear what you think about AIR regardless.
The Science of Reading and Decodables
While I was still teaching, the science of reading was becoming a bigger and bigger trend. Because I was an English language teacher at the high school level, it seemed a bit too basic for a lot of my students, but as I turned my attention toward many of the skills I'd been neglecting, I started to realize that there was a real need for phonemic awareness and phonics in the classroom. And that was the beginning of our decodable books.
Over the past several months, we have been creating and illustrating decodables that are meant for secondary and adult students. For those of you who are unaware of the concept, decodables essentially highlight specific phonemes so that students are able to hear the sounds made by specific letters. Letter sounds then become implicit.
If you would like to get a sneak peak into our decodables, I would love to show them to you in a short meeting. Click below and I can take you through them.
Otherwise, we will be gradually releasing them over the next week onto our platform for people to use them for free.
New and Improved Ari, the AI Reading Tutor
I have spoken with teachers all over the country, and one issue that almost everybody brings up is this: students are not talking. My first response to this is that they probably don't have the language to speak. If they are not processing language regularly, they won't have the words to speak. That is my language acquisition background coming out.
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But, the more I spoke with people, the more I realized that there may be something else at play.
I began to consider that students often felt shame when speaking, or perhaps didn't know how to start. I remembered back to when I moved to Mexico after college, and how stupid I felt when talking with people, regardless of whether they were judging me or not, and I couldn't help bugging feel that perhaps my students felt the same. I was beginning to see.
All of this was happening when ChatGPT started coming out with new AI systems and one of our advisers showed me a video of a math tutor. "What about this? What is your response to this?"
My cofounder Nick and I begin thinking about all of the implications of this cool new technology that was available for us to use. The next morning I woke up with purpose, and we discussed outlined everything from the name of our reading tutor, Ari, to what she could be capable of doing. The update that we just released is the next step along that path. Initially, Ari could just have a simple conversation that led students through a protocol around reading. It was a great move, but not perfect.
Now, she does so much more. Here is what Ari is capable of:
As we continue to develop our company into all that it can be, we will continue to be mindful of what the teachers and students need in order to be successful in the classroom.
Too many multilingual students are leaving school without the tools they need to survive in this world and that is our real motivation.
Kyle Larson
CEO