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It's English, baby!

West Linn business offers immersion in U.S. popular culture over the Internet for language students

Friday, September 29, 2000 - See article at OregonLive.com

By Dana Tims of The Oregonian staff

From a small office just off Interstate 205, four University of Oregon graduates are teaching students in Japan, India, Peru and points between how to speak conversational English -- American style.

Their fledgling West Linn business is called English, baby! -- a slick, flashy Internet immersion experience that seeks to teach its online students to communicate by steeping them in Western pop music and culture.

More than 3,000 users in 60 nations have signed up for lessons. The company's Web site, offering 60,000 pages of instruction and information, gets 14,000 hits a month.

The site's owners, all 20-something first-time Internet entrepreneurs, are quick to acknowledge that those figures aren't even a fraction of the estimated millions worldwide who are studying English as a second language.

But with a $500,000 fund-raising effort nearly completed, they are confident they can continue carving inroads while avoiding the financial malaise that has spelled doom during the past four months for dozens of dot-com businesses.

Two reasons provide that optimism, says Chief Executive Officer John Hayden.

First, the company was small when the industrywide shakeout came, so it didn't face the prospect of laying off dozens of employees. Also, it offers a service that, unlike online bookstores or grocery operations, can't be easily duplicated by merely walking down the street to the nearest book vendor or supermarket.

"This is a chance to apply lessons that users could only get by traveling to an English-speaking country," Hayden says. "If you live in Japan, for instance, it's hardly convenient to do that."

Within two or three years, he predicts, the company should not only be turning a profit but also representing an indispensable piece of Web-based language instruction.

Real-world lessons The company's business plan is sculpted from lessons learned by first studying Japanese in college and, later, teaching English in Japan. Their eye-opener came when, upon first arriving in Japan, they realized that all the grammar and vocabulary lessons in the world couldn't prepare them for real-life conversations.

English, baby! tries to correct that by posting instructional materials drawn directly from popular culture. From Madonna to the Monkees, from trendy movie dialogue to swapping e-mails and jokes, the lessons strive to give students a feel for how English is spoken in the real world.

Zach Hoffman, the company's vice president for Web development, recalls how his own Japanese students coped in the classroom just fine as long as he stuck to traditional teaching materials. But whenever students visited the United States, they returned feeling defeated and more language-challenged than ever.

"They found they could shop and order food, but they were extremely frustrated because they couldn't interact with their peers," he says. "They weren't able to grasp mainstream culture because they'd had no real exposure to it."

Lively learning environment The Web site looks nothing like a staid classroom environment. Bright graphics dance across the screen. Buttons directing students to other pages flash and buzz. Online trivia tests are graded immediately with scores posted at the bottom of Web pages splashed with purple and orange.

One current posting, for instance, includes dialogue from the movie "Mission to Mars." Accompanying notes illuminate the film's slang-filled comments, which otherwise might fly right over the head of a non-English speaker.

"These guys are all good friends and are in the habit of busting each other's chops," the notes tell students, following dialogue passages in which the three astronauts ribbingly refer to each other as "stick jockeys." "It sounds like they are insulting each other, but it is actually a sign of their friendship."

Another page quizzes students about the definition of the slang word of the week, "psyched." In posted responses, Ammar, who lives in Udhailiyah, Saudi Arabia, guesses it means to be "emotionally excited." Isak, in New York, thinks it means being "too excited so as to behave like a psycho."

"The whole goal is to immerse our students in the reality of another culture," Hayden says. "We're simply giving them the interactive tools to do that."

The company got its start two years ago, when Hayden offered to write e-mails for some of his Japanese students. Responding to clamors from others, Hayden expanded the enterprise to include online clients. Soon, he started a Web site to channel the missives and started charging clients $40 a month to use it.

Monthly use shot upward. It wasn't long before he, Hoffman and co-partner Miguel McKelvey began catching glimpses of the venture's possibilities.

"We saw the chance to create a virtual America," Hayden says. "What we have on the site now are all the elements to replicate language immersion."

A niche among competitors English, baby! is not the only company offering English over the Internet. Larger and more established ventures include Portland's Cenquest. But a survey of other Web-based language courses shows that English, baby! is the only one deriving its instructional materials solely from popular culture.

Hayden hopes to capitalize on that niche by offering the company's materials to other language-instruction companies.

"What that gives us," he says, "is the ability to turn competitors into collaborators."

The strategy, known as "co-opetition," is drawn directly from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' management textbook. It's loosely defined as lambs and lions lying down together for the mutual benefit of all concerned.

English, baby! hopes to do the same thing with large, classroom-based programs. The strategy is showing signs of success. A South Korean university has already signed a letter of intent to begin paying to use the company's materials as supplements to traditional vocabulary and grammar lessons.

Still, the company's principals acknowledge that they have a long way to go to achieve financial solvency. So far, generous family support has kept food on their respective tables. But as the company's success and client list grows, so will the pressure to start charging fees for what are now free offerings.

For Hayden and McKelvey, who worked the entire past year without drawing a salary, and Jon Reed, who recently joined English, baby! as its wireless specialist, that moment won't come too soon.

But for now, it's one step, one day and one language at a time.