Language education
Process and practice of acquiring a language
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We include updates on Alexander Graham Bell, Anne Sullivan, Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, List of multilingual presidents of the United States, Antonio Machado, Memrise, Linguistic prescription, Elocution, Jeffrey Wigand, Preply, Yuval Abraham, Agata Kornhauser-Duda, Collocation, Cuisenaire rods, Busuu, Maulana Azad National Urdu University ... and more.
| 2024 | Dale Kedwards joins the department as a lecturer. |
| July 2024 | Memrise announced in a blog post that community courses will be removed from their new app experience and moved to a separate platform. |
| February 2024 | Memrise again separated community courses to a new website, making them inaccessible through the updated mobile app and removing offline download capabilities. |
| 2023 | Ben Guy becomes a lecturer in the department. |
| 2023 | UNESCO publication recognized the Memrise projects for Ume Sámi and Kristang languages as 'inspiring stories' in indigenous language documentation and preservation. |
| 2023 | Memrise integrates a GPT-3-powered AI Language partner into its official courses, aimed at helping language learners practice human-like conversations and overcome the 'confidence gap' in language acquisition. |
| December 8 2023 | Memrise closed its community forum as part of the transition away from supporting community-created content. |
| November 2023 | Memrise announced plans to 'sunset' user-created courses, signaling a shift away from community-generated content. |
| 2022 | Pimsleur offered its Ukrainian Premium course to support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. |
| 2022 | Pimsleur released Voice Coach, a voice recognition tool with instant feedback. |
| September 2022 | Memrise completely removed the 'mems' feature from the site, a decision that generated significant negative user feedback in the official forum. |
| June 2022 | The ASNC Society launches a new updated website, modernizing their online presence and communication platform. |
| 2021 | Pimsleur introduced an All Access subscription plan containing all 51 languages. |
| 2020 | Pimsleur added bonus content to its Premium courses and started selling courses via a subscription model in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. |
| February 25 2020 | In response to user criticism, Memrise reversed the previous decision by undoing the split and merging community course content back to the main Memrise site. |
| 2019 | Rory Naismith and Erik Niblaeus join the department as lecturers. |
| 2019 |
Computer-assisted language learning
IALLT officially merged its journal into The FLTMAG.
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| February 2019 | Memrise announced the creation of 'Decks' to separate community courses, planning to move user-created content to a different web-based platform without offline access. |
| 2018 | Pimsleur released its mobile app for iOS and Android, compatible with Amazon Echo devices, and replaced Unlimited with Pimsleur Premium. |
| 2018 |
Computer-assisted language learning
Fifth WorldCALL conference held in Concepción, Chile.
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| 2018 | The Institute on Collaborative Language Research at the University of California organized a workshop to teach participants how to use Memrise for teaching and learning endangered languages, highlighting its potential for language revitalization. |
| May 2017 | Memrise won the 'Best App' award at the second edition of the Google Play awards. |
| 2016 | Pimsleur made its Unlimited product line available as digital downloads worldwide. |
| 2016 | Memrise became profitable, achieving a monthly turnover of $4 million. |
| 2015 | Pimsleur released Unlimited interactive software for Mandarin, Portuguese, and Russian languages. |
| 2013 | Pimsleur celebrated its 50th anniversary and launched the blog 'Pimsleur Speaks: On Language, Learning, and Culture'. |
| 2013 | Pimsleur donated 15 lessons of its Tagalog course to support aid agencies and volunteers after Typhoon Haiyan. |
| 2013 |
Computer-assisted language learning
Fourth WorldCALL conference took place in Glasgow, Scotland.
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| 2013 | Ben Whately and Ed Cooke discussed their strategic approach to creating mems, focusing on leveraging internet culture's fascination with cats and the potential cognitive benefits of 'cuteness'. |
| 2012 | Pimsleur released Pimsleur Unlimited, an interactive software version of Spanish, German, French, and Italian courses. |
| 2012 |
Computer-assisted language learning
TCLT began publishing in-print supplement Series of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching with China Social Sciences Press.
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| 2012 | Ed Cooke highlighted the network effect of learning through mems, emphasizing how more users contribute to creating new mnemonic content on the platform. |
| 2012 | Less than two years after launching, Memrise had crowdsourced learning materials for approximately 100 languages, ranging from widely spoken to niche languages like Catalan, Haitian Creole, Klingon, Toki Pona, and Esperanto. |
| October 1 2012 | Memrise launched Memrise 1.0, allowing 100 users to sign up and test the non-beta version of the website. |
| September 2012 | Memrise temporarily suspended its website leaderboard due to extensive cheating by users employing bots and non-intensive mechanisms to artificially inflate their learning scores. |
| 2011 | Pimsleur donated eight hours of its Japanese course to support aid agencies and volunteers after the tsunami disaster. |
| March 2011 | Memrise was selected as one of the Techstars Boston startups. |
| 2010 | Pimsleur partnered with the USO, The Boston Foundation, and Playaway to produce Pashto and Dari courses for U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan. |
| 2010 | Pimsleur donated its Haitian Creole course for free to relief and charity workers after the Haiti earthquake. |
| 2010 |
Computer-assisted language learning
TCLT began publishing the peer-reviewed online Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching.
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| November 2010 | Memrise was named as a finalist for the 2010 TechCrunch Europas Start-up of the Year. |
| July 2010 | Memrise was named as one of the winners of the London Mini-Seedcamp competition. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Memrise, Pimsleur Language Programs, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge & Computer-assisted language learning, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.