Hello,

I’m a co-developer of a captioned video site called 22frames.com.  It has indexed several thousands of captioned videos from all over the Internet, and it’s growing.  Recently, we found out that many of our users are using the site to supplement their English learning (see: http://www.22frames.com/esl.aspx ).  They also began to pitch ideas we could implement to make the site even more useful for this activity.  We decided to seriously consider these ideas and devote resources into realizing them.  Our first step was to process a few thousand of the YouTube videos in our index and provide timestamps for examples of difficult English phrases (common mispronunciations, slang terms, and idioms).  The site currently offers these features and we’ve received good feedback as they give realistic situations that use these phrases. See the menu above this video for examples: http://www.22frames.com/video.aspx?id=190063 .  Other pages to check out are: http://www.22frames.com/mispronouncedwordslist.aspx , http://www.22frames.com/slanglist.aspx , http://www.22frames.com/idiomlist.aspx . By the way, no cost or sign-up is involved.

Given the open tools and APIs for rapid prototyping that are made available to us, we believe that we are capable of doing even more.  The issue, however, is finding out what students and teachers actually want in this space of ESL applications.  There are other sites out there with different features, but we would like to avoid being redundant.  For this reason, we are opening the door to anyone in this forum that has any amount of experience with using videos with ESL to offer us their thoughts and feature requests.  Hopefully this dialogue can help prioritize which ideas receive the most of our programming resources.

Finally, we plan on sharing this request with a few other forums.  Hopefully, you can also help forward it on to anyone that might be interested. 

Cheers,

-Fletch

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