Karyn Koven Podcast: The Beauty of Learning Another Language

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host, Shellee.

Hello, this is Shellee Howard with Parents, Is Your Teen College Ready? And today I have another amazing guest that you've gotta listen to, Dr. Karen Kovan, founder, CEO of LanguageBird. Welcome to the show, Karen.

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Wonderful. Well, can you please share with our listeners a little bit about your background? Why Language Bird? You know, just so they can understand what we're going to be talking about today.

Sure, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. Um, I'm happy to talk to parents and to students. That's what I know best and where I like to live, if you will. Um, I am Los Angeles-based. I am a lifelong educator. I always wanted to be a teacher from the time I was young. I taught English to high school students at a comprehensive high school.

I did yearbook.

I did all the fun things that you do when you're a young teacher in their 20s and very excited to be there and work with those kids. And I really fell in love with the age of those students. And as I was teaching them English and grading their essays and so on, I ended up really doing some college counseling. And I loved helping them with their college essays and their applications. And from that point, I went into the UCLA program for my certification in college counseling, and I did that online way back in 2000.

Um, you know, online learning back in the day. It's different now. Um, and I really became curious about, um, the way students get into college, the way that they look at that, the way that they look at the next steps. And I felt like it was such an honor and such an amazing position to be in, to be there for the students and the parents during that transition period. And as my career evolved and I really loved that aspect of it. I ended up going on to be a founding faculty member at High Tech High Los Angeles, which is a school in the San Fernando Valley, and I worked there in college counseling, hiring teachers, doing professional development, all sorts of administrative tasks. And while I was there, I also got my doctorate at UCLA in educational leadership. I love creating education programs that help students solve their problems. And while I was at this wonderful charter high school and my job was to get every kid into college and hopefully with a scholarship, that was my mission, I developed an internship program and I was looking at other things that were helping them to get into college. Like, what is— what's the magic thing, right? Is it SATs? Is it this? Is it that. And I thought a combination of real-world experience that they could talk about in these essays, doing work, but also interesting and unique coursework that they could take, and also persisting in subjects like math, like world language, th— those kinds of things made them a standout on their college applications and made them more eligible for what we consider to be prestigious colleges and colleges that are difficult to get into in terms of acceptance. And as I was at this school, there was a California, you know, acclaimed school, all sorts of awards. I realized that we only offered Spanish, and what could we do to possibly augment that curriculum to help students who wanted to learn other languages? Maybe they already spoke Spanish at home, other than send them to community college, which wasn't always is a good fit to send a 14-year-old to be in class with adults.

What's wrong there?

They didn't have transportation there to start with, then the classes go at a faster pace, and maybe they wanted to sort of explore it, but they weren't sure. So there were a lot of things that weren't a good fit about community college. And then I put them on some software because online learning started to trickle a little bit. This was like around 2009, 2010. Um, and I did research for my dissertation at UCLA about online learning. I ended up writing about how to create a college-going culture in California high schools. So I had sort of all this interesting background research, and, and by the time it hit like 2014 and these kids were on software in order to take a language class, I thought, let's try this. What if they want to take French? You know, let's get them on this program or this program. And what I saw was that because there was no teacher, no interaction, no relationship being created, no accountability, because you were just putting information into a machine and, you know, reading a course videos, etc., that there wasn't that relationship created, and therefore the meaning wasn't there. Why do we learn a language? Why do you want to communicate with other people? What is it about other people's cultures that can help you in future jobs or in future relationships? And I thought There's this thing that we do that's this, you know, FaceTime, the FaceTime, you know, the iPhones were coming out and such. And I thought, what if I could find teachers that were passionate about their language and their culture and they could meet with students in order to teach them a language that these students also were really interested in learning, whether it was inspired by anime or Korean films or whatever it was that was so cool that was really igniting their passion. It's like, well, let's capitalize on that and have them pursue that. And as you can imagine, it wasn't until about February or March of 2020 that when I was talking to parents on the phone and saying, I have this great program, I wrote this terrific curriculum, we have these amazing engaged teachers that teach your students one-to-one live via video chat, and they'd always say, what's video chat? I don't understand. So for the longest time, I had to explain that it's this really neat way that we meet live.

Have you ever done Zoom? Have you ever done FaceTime? Not really.

So it's hard to believe now where we stand, Shellee, that, you know, just a few short years ago, the idea of meeting via video chat, especially for high school courses, was a really super foreign idea. So it's really— Languagebird for me is a passion project. It turned into over the years from 2014 when I started it until today to be something that is more widely accepted. Online learning, fortunately, is no longer seen as sort of a one-off or something that just weird kids do or homeschool kids or, you know, athletes or, you know, stars or something that are on TV. But it's really something that's accessible and makes a lot of more options accessible to every student. So parents demanding blended learning, more opportunities for students, more ways to differentiate their students' interests, whether it be taking piano lessons or sports lessons or singing or being, you know, a leader or taking languages, in our case, to a high level, are different ways that students can differentiate themselves and really express their individuality and their interests. Wow.

I'm just listening as a parent, as a mom of 4, thinking I really wish I could have known you back when, because, you know, not every student is gifted at language. Some of them really struggle. My first, he had a Hispanic nanny who only spoke to him in Spanish until he was 4. And wow, he just caught on to it super fast. And his dialect, everything was just very natural. Where my second child, she didn't have any of that, any nanny or somebody speaking to her in any language until high school. What a difference. She had to fight through it so much more. And just, you know, they say that kids are a sponge, and that's so true. Um, I, I love this a lot. So I had an Italian exchange student live with me last year, and she came knowing very little English, or she pretended that she didn't know very much English. Um, what— how she was able to leave in just 11 months, she was completely fluent. It was brilliant. Read, write, the whole thing. I learned maybe 7 words of Italian. Like, it was so frustrating because my brain was all over the place instead of just focused. So what do you think is the best age to really capture somebody in the language, the learning? That— what do you think that is?

Well, it's interesting that you bring up age because I don't think that that's necessarily it. I mean, we have had parents of our students listening to the lessons that their students are taking because they're taking them, you know, on their dining room table or whatever, or in their, you know, desks in their, in their bedrooms. And moms are walking by going, oh my God, I can't believe I'm hearing my son speaking to Mercedes in Spain, and I've never heard him speak another language before. Always homework was done, you know, written or reading, but I've never heard him speak to somebody in such a natural way. And to your point with your exchange student who stayed with you, the real key, it seems, no matter what age you are, to learning language is being in an authentic situation where you get to immerse yourself and practice. So while this young lady was living with you and spoke Italian, she was immersed in the culture, right? So she was going to school in it, she heard your kids talking, she heard you, she was Watching television, right? She had a lot of opportunities to hear and to practice. And I imagine that when she was in your house or you're at the dinner table, you know, just like when your kids were growing up and they were little, you know, if they were trying to express themselves and she made a mistake or picked the wrong word or the wrong formation of a sentence, you know, you probably didn't say, "Nope, that's not the way you say it. Stop there." You know, "Let me correct you. Hold on, let me take out the English book and let me show you the grammatical explanation for it." No, you let children express themselves, and even if they don't know all the right words, or they can only string together at first 2 words and then 3 words and then 5 words, right? That's the natural progression of learning language. And so I think as adults, we are a little bit too stuck in the structure, and maybe our school has taught us before, or the way we've learned language has taught us before, that you learn in an order, you learn out of a textbook, you first learn the grammar. But it's really contrary to how we naturally learn language. I mean, you don't see any toddlers reading textbooks, right? So, you know, how we approach it is like make it really engaging, make it project-based. If there's a kid that comes to us that's like, I'm really struggling in Spanish, I really don't see its meaning, let's connect to it, right? Let's teach you baseball Spanish. You know, you play on the baseball team, you know, let's Let's give you vocabulary so that when you're out on, you know, at your club team or whatever, you can talk to some of the kids or you know what they're saying, right? Or if you have a heritage language, you have grandparents in Italy and you're going to travel there. Well, let's talk about how you want to talk to them. What are phrases that you want to know? So you make it really applicable. Language, like math, is really iterative in that it's not linear, right? And it's not separated. So just because you're in Spanish 3 doesn't mean that you might not go back concepts in Spanish 1. You might forget or need to be reminded or forget a word, right? I don't know about you, but today I still even forget English words that I'm looking for, right? Where you're like, oh, hold on, I gotta go back and figure that out. You know, it's, it's, it's about the brain. So what we try to do in our lessons is create the connection, the relationship like you had with your exchange students, so that they start to trust and they start to listen, and then they start to take experimental steps and risks. You're less likely to take a risk in front of a classroom full of your peers that you might sound silly, right, with your Spanish or Italian accent that you think sounds ridiculous, and maybe it does, but you're more likely to take that risk in front of a trusted teacher that will say, just like you did as a mom, Good job. Like, I understood what you were saying. You wanted, you know, milk. You wanted this. And now, you know, keep going, keep going. So it's all about the relationship and relevancy. And then of course there's rigor to it, right? So you're expected to come to class and there's accountability because you're not sitting in the back, right? I know, I'll admit it, there are some things that I was not good at, but I got good grades because I did my homework. And I wasn't disruptive, and I, you know, did well on the test, but I wasn't as much volunteering or talking during class. There were other kids that really liked to do that, and I was sort of more thoughtful. I wanted to think about my answers. I wanted to write them down. So when you're learning a language, you really need that time to be able to think, even if it takes you longer than other kids, and then the opportunity to try.

Wow, I'm— I, I just—

I'm—

my 4 children keep going back and forth as you're saying this. I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, that one, that one. Yeah, how do we take the language? You started off talking about how to use language to show colleges something else about you. So this is about college. How do we connect Languagebird, college, the student, not just to check another box, but to genuinely have a wonderful thing to share in an interview or to talk about in an essay.

Yeah, um, there are a variety of ways to do that. First, I'll go back, I guess, to your initial comment, which was about the college admissions process, you know.

Oh, for, for some point in time, it feels like a lot, right? It's, it's there, it's everywhere. It's what you're thinking of, let's say, all of your junior year and your senior year, maybe even some of your sophomore year before, depending. But it's really all-encompassing. It's all the things that you're doing and all the things that it seems to be that you're working for and towards. Um, I always, when I worked with families, when I work with students, I like to present the bigger picture, right? You'll get into a college, we're sure of that. You know, you're on the path, you're on the track for that, but then what happens when you get there? And what a lot of families don't think about is the longer road. When you get to XYZ college that you wanted to attend and you're thinking about a major at that time or what kind of classes you might take. You may not know when applying to X number of schools that many of those schools, once you get there, have a language requirement. And a lot of students opt out of taking world language in high school because they think, I'm going to take AP Chem and I'm going to take, you know, this or that and be a leader and be on the, you know, baseball team and also be the lead in the play and all these things that they opt to do. But what happens is, imagine if you stop taking math as a sophomore in high school and then you enter college and you want to be an engineer, right? It's not going to happen. So the skills and persisting in the language isn't necessarily always encouraged at all high schools in favor of doing other things that seem to be much more appealing and harder. And more flashy like AP Physics, and, and all those things are fantastic if you're good at them and that's the direction that you're going, for sure. But the value of persisting in the language can make you really a standout because most high schools only require 1 to 2 years of world language. So if you take 4 years of world language, whether it be at your school or with LanguageBird, you have something that sticks out on your application.

Aha!

Shellee really stuck with it. She stuck through Spanish 4. Maybe even she took— with us, we offer Spanish 5 and 6 because students can progress a lot faster because it's one-to-one. So we offer higher-level classes. So that could be something that's, you know, flagged. She stuck to it. That shows a stick-to-itiveness. It also shows that when she gets here and we give her the placement test, because let's say you think, oh, I want to major in art history, right? And you think that doesn't have anything to do with language. Well, actually, most art history majors also have to double major in English— I'm sorry, in Italian or German or French, right, alongside of art history. Um, some engineering majors want to also major or take classes in German so that they can get an internship at a great company that's maybe out of the country or study abroad eventually. So all of these things lead students, if they don't persist in the language, to freshman year having to start in Spanish 1 all over again because there's learning loss. You don't remember things from level 1 or 2. You might have gotten an A, but that was 2 years ago, maybe even 2 months ago. You'd need a refresh. So So that part of it is really good. And like I mentioned, a lot of students don't persist because the emphasis in our culture doesn't emphasize as much learning other languages. Most of my teachers speak anywhere from 2 to 6 languages. So when you look at people who live abroad and have grown up abroad, especially in European countries, they really have a leg up over us in a lot of ways in terms of future jobs, communication, um, by from an early age studying and making sure that they know how to communicate in another language.

All of that is so important. Um, I can share my own personal story briefly. Um, so my firstborn, um, was bored learning colors and numbers, right, in his language, and so he would tune out. It just didn't keep him stimulated. And then he got into Spanish 2, and he's like, yeah, still not a lot. And then when he hit Spanish 3, it hit him hard because he did not really play all in for 1 and 2. He was just smart enough just to, you know, get by, no problem. So when he went off to college, he had to start over and do world language, just like you're saying, freshman and sophomore year at Harvard, and he had already taken 4 years at the high school. Yeah, but just didn't put it— didn't really put himself out there to make it important. He did AP Chem, la la la la, and what I learned is that exactly what you said. So I thought, I'm just going to share my example. And I'll never forget, we, we do a lot of world travel, and so I value language hugely. It's very important, culture and language inclusive inclusivity. And we took a trip to Colombia together his freshman year at Harvard on break. And he studied so hard to learn the Spanish language that he was fluent by the time we got there because he wanted to use it when we got to travel.

The incentive.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what you're saying, I'm just letting my listeners hear from my perspective, my own child, what that looked like. So if they are meeting with somebody who can speak their language— baseball or karate or band or whatever— and they're talking in that language, yeah, it's gonna be a better connect than turn to page 24 in your grammar book and let's conjugate the verbs or something. And they're gonna be like, oh, that's so boring.

I mean, we've had kids write books of poetry, right? Songs and music in the language, you know, and first they start with listening to songs and then they want to write their own song.

And so we really focus on having teachers who are interesting, engaging, and interested in working with high school students and love sharing their language and culture.

So the culture aspect is a big part of it. The travel, the opportunities. Some students while in high school get some of those opportunities, whether it be for a service trip.

And sometimes parents will come to us and say, we know that they're taking Spanish, but we would like to have a little bit more practice in case, you know, they are in a bus station or something, that they get a little bit more familiar with thinking and speaking to a native speaker. As you can imagine, there's different accents, right? So somebody from Colombia might speak very differently than somebody from Spain. And so hearing doing different accents is important to get that sort of experience. So some families, just like in school, they'll take, you know, Spanish 1 with one teacher, switch to another teacher, so on, to get that experience. Others want to stick with the same teacher the whole time, which they think is fun. And the nice thing is, it's just like you and I are meeting, and we record it, and so students can go back and listen to it. So if they're really auditory, they can listen to their lesson again and say, oh, how did she say it and what did I say. And, you know, so that they have the recording of it. And we also take notes for the student, which is helpful so that they can focus on listening and speaking when they're in the lesson. They don't have to focus on taking the notes because the teacher is doing that for them. So I think that that's a helpful aspect as well. And some teachers, like you said, So sorry, some students, like you said, are really challenged and others, like, language is their thing.

Yeah.

So we have some students taking 4 languages at a time, which they couldn't be doing at their high school, right? It's like you pick Spanish or French, but we have a student who's taking Mandarin, German, and I think Portuguese, um, because she's just like a a sponge. You know, her mom is like, this is her thing. Some kids sing, some kids, you know, play tennis. You know, my kid, this is, this is what she loves and is interested in and wants to do these things. Um, we've had kids who were adopted, uh, who want to immerse themselves and know a little bit about the language and culture of, um, the place from where they were adopted. Um, we have, like I mentioned, heritage languages, so families that want to feel more connected. And then we have families that sometimes come to even learn together. So if you were going on a trip to Colombia and you said, we want a chat room, and every Friday night we usually have a game night, or we all have dinner together, but afterwards we want our activity to be to meet with one of your teachers leading up to our trip so that we all get practice speaking together, some phrases and things.

We customize some programs like that as well. And something that would have been good, actually, because you mentioned your son and gave that example, but something that would have been really good was to be able to take the Global Seal of Biliteracy. And that's something that we offer too, which goes with students beyond high school. So there's actually a spot for it on LinkedIn where you can put that you took the Global Seal and that you were either working proficient um, or functionally proficient. And you can take the test as many times as you want, so it's not like an AP test or an SAT where you get like one shot, two shot. Um, it's more that you can keep trying, and you can even take it as an adult, anybody over the age of 13. So we have all kinds of students of all ages taking that to show their proficiency, and I think that's like a really nice capstone for students when they've gone through our classes and a good alignment. We don't teach to any particular test, but when they get to the end of their 4th year course or a 5th year course with us, they then can elect to take this test and really get validation to take forward with them, um, into work life and their, you know, professional life, personal life, to show that they have this experience. So that's valuable too.

So if a family was listening and they wanted to reach out to you, What would be the best way for them to connect to you?

Well, I would ask them to first go to our website, which is languagebird.com. I picked a bird because you'll see our, our mascot is very sort of familiar to high school students. Fun, friendly, playful. That's what I feel like our lessons are like. Birds also fly, they travel, they chirp, Right? They're talkative. They're excited. So when I say Language Bird, people go, "Language Bird? Okay, bird together. Okay." Yeah, so if they go to languagebird.com, they can check out all of our programs, all of our offerings. We have a form on our website. We have a chat on our website where they can request a curriculum, more information. They can also call us. We have a phone number where they can call and talk to an admissions counselor. We have a full academic team as well. Our number is really easy to remember. It's 844-700-BIRD.

Okay, I love it.

So that's easy too, but we do have admissions counselors who are academically able to advise parents, families, if they decide to call and they're interested in some aspect of what we do. Um, and yeah, we'd love to know that they came from you too, Shellee Howard. So, um, that would be helpful if they let us know that, and that way that we know that they heard sort of this conversation today and where we're starting off from.

Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. And parents, your teen can enjoy this process. Just know the opportunities that we give you on this podcast are to make their life better. So thank you all for being here.

Thank you, Shellee.