Second language students become better speakers if they practice speaking their target language more often. Unfortunately, most students fear embarrassingly simple and error-prone conversations with "judgmental" fluent speakers to the point where they stop practicing. The Language Dialer addresses these issues by offering practice conversations that encourage errors in a safe environment to develop listening and speaking skills. It is designed to encourage practice, rather than teach language lessons. This is an important distinction. It uses telephony and dynamic web technology to foster simulated conversations. The conversations occur over the telephone. This is how it works:
1. The Language Dialer website stores pre-recorded scenes into which a student calls and speaks. A scene is a conversation that follows a specific theme. These themes are designed to mimic everyday conversations, like ordering food in a restaurant. In this example, a student would hear a waiter asking questions, with pauses in between words, that need to be answered. A student controls the topic of conversation - choosing one scene over another to match his comfort level - as a way of encouraging practice. A student can preview a call's audio file before calling to eliminate surprises.
2. When ready, a student calls the telephone number, enters the code number that triggers that scene's audio file and talks with the pre-recording. This conversation is itself recorded and replayed to the student for review. It is also stored on the student's personal page through the Language Dialer.
3. If registered, the student can also email each scene recording to a "tutor" - someone close to the student who is fluent in the target language. The tutor can also review the call, and phone in a critique message for the student, to whom it will be emailed.
The Language Dialer uses tutors to create scene files. If a first-time registered student, studying German, for example, needs scenes to call, she can ask her tutor to call the Language Dialer phone number to record the conversation she wishes to practice.

The Language Dialer is designed for language acquisition and not language learning. Language learning is a classroom activity that is intended to teach new material to students. Language acquisition is a process through which a new speaker develops speaking and listening skills with trial and error. A student learns language in a classroom; a child acquires language through speaking - conveying meaning through words that may not follow grammar rules initially. It is in this distinction that the Language Dialer offers technology to aid language acquisition. No amount of computer science can make language acquisition easy or quick - and I can\'t develop Bengali skills unless I speak more. All of these points were found in research in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), and various theories in language acquisition. Furthermore, my experiences learning Bengali with a \"Teach Yourself Bengali\" book guided me in designing this program.

Students - mainly adult students - of second languages. This website is English-centric, meaning all descriptions and over-the-phone instructions are recorded and written in English. All that considered, it can work in any language and between one or more people with a telephone and an email address.

A junior at NYU studying German 101 runs into www.languagedialer.com. His name is Ron. Ron sees a \"German\" link on the home page - after quickly looking at the all the words, barely reading all the details, and clicks. The link opens to a German-centered home-page that broadcasts up front that currently \"12 Scenes are available for practice conversations.\" Below the header, he sees 10 small images with very brief descriptions beside short number codes. \"Scene #92 Registering in a Hotel - \'click here to preview\'\" - Ron clicks the small link which opens a quicktime player, playing a short, one-sided German conversation he imagines is about registering in a hotel. On another side of the page, he sees a series of approximately 10 \"recent calls\" with similar \'click here to review\' links. Each link plays an audio file of a student stumbling through truly awful German 101-ish in a conversation with the one-sided conversation he just heard. Now he sees the instructions - \"Dial 1-212-372-7706 to practice speaking. If you are not registered, press 1# at the main menu, and enter the scene code, highlighted in red on this page.\" So he does - it\'s a horribly uncomfortable conversation with more errors and misunderstanding. He notices that it is immediately linked on the page for other students to hear (anonymously). Intrigued further, he registers as a user, and invites his German professor as a site tutor to receive email links to some of his calls.

The Language Dialer is a php-driven website that stores audio files created in phone conversations using the Asterisk programming language. Calls into the system are separated by a number of traits - unregistered students can record conversations; registered users can record conversations and email them to tutors; tutors can record voicemail-like critiques of student calls, as well as one-sided scenes for student participation. Additionally, there is a phone-pals offering, that links native speakers of one-language with target speakers of another. If Ron is learning German and a native English speaker, he can link up to another registered student whose native language is Ron\'s target, and whose target is Ron\'s native language. This one-to-one relationship is guided by a series of brief phone projects for them to solve - both speaking in only their target language. And example project is following directions on a map and talking, in voicemail exchanges emailed to one another, through the map.

I broke my soul building this damn thing. I started this program having never before seen html script, much less anything else to do with anything computational. Letting this project stand alone will be a difficult process. There are many aspects of this technology that are not intuitive - all the scene codes and PIN numbers for students. Furthermore, I expect many issues with tutors recording scenes - it is a hard thing to record a one-sided conversation.