Presentation Outline

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gui Bueno, I’m a foreign student from Brazil and I’m here to talk about something I’m very passtionate about,
which is: language learning. But it’s funny, ‘cause people are usually passionate about things that they are very good at. And although today I’m a language teacher,
… and I have actually struggled a lot with language learning in the past. After 10 years studying English, I couldn’t even handle a simple conversation in English. And all that struggle was because of something called…
foreign language anxiety, which is that fear, embarrassment, or shyness that even thinking of speaking foreign languages in front of people may cause you. Being here today, speaking English in front of a live audience and even a camera is really a huge achievement that means a lot to me.
If you’ve ever experienced foreign language anxiety, you know what I’m talking about, And I’d love to hear your stories about that, so come to my booth, number 5. And don’t worry, this is not yet the end of my presentation! In fact, I’ll now walk you through a…
very realistic scenario. Let’s imagine that each one of you here really wants to learn Brazilian Portuguese. For any reason. Maybe you’re applying for a job in Brazil, or just making plans to visit Brazil, or you’re getting married to a Brazilian person… Whichever reason, you just really want to learn Portuguese!
And so you’ll pick up your mobile device and you’ll search for language learning apps. Among hundreds of options, you will probably download Babbel, Duolingo, and Memrise.
All these apps will prompt you with several games of translation matching: they’ll give you a word in Portuguese, you pick the translation in English. Or vice-versa. But you won’t stop there, for sure…
You will also install Rosetta-Stone, of course. After all, this is a multi-million dollar company, so these guys must really know what they are doing.
And when you use Rosetta-Stone, you’ll match audio sentences in Portuguese with pictures, without using any English. You’ll get excited and you’ll be serious about practicing. After not too long, let’s say… a week, I’m sure you’ll be great, you’ll be proficient, you’ll be an expert at…
Touching your cellphone screen. Because that’s what you’ll be doing most of the time. And now you’ll ask me: “But, Gui, will that make me a good Portuguese speaker?”. And I’ll have to be honest and say:
Absolutely not! Not in my opinion, at least. You become good at things as you do these things many times. These apps may prompt you to speak every now and then, but this is not enough. You’ll end up getting frustrated, or even worse,
you’ll think that language learning is not your thing. But I’m here to tell you, that there is a very rare species of bug that may help you in this situation
I introduce you to this bug, the LANGUAGE BUG! Language Bugs are attracted by the smell of foreign language anxiety. So they will find you and bite you, which will result in an..
infection! But don’t worry, this is not a bad infection. It’s an infection as much as sipederman was infected by a spider, that is, it’s an infection that will give you superpowers,
Language Learning Superpowers! Of course, you won’t know exactly how to use your superpowers right away. Again, just like Spiderman didn’t know how to throw his web at the beginning. But the LanguageBug app will
help you get to know the specific superpowers you have. It will make you think about the way you think when learning languages, btw, this is called metacognition
The app will then scaffold you to using those superpowers. Step-by-step, introducing you to efficient strategies…
while also taking care of your emotions and expectations, letting you know that it takes time to fully develop a superpower.
Then, you will be ready train these new skills when talking to other bugs about a variety of topics.
This is a speak-first approach, so you will be speaking all the time. And that’s going to be your only task: speak. Embody your target language!
And finally, you’ll record yourself speaking Portuguese, practice after practice, you will see how much you’re improving, (and you can even brag about it to your friends!)
Well, if you want to try LanguageBug’s speak first approach, visit my booth (number 5) and try out our live demo.
Thank you once again! My name is Gui Bueno. It’s been a pleasure.