Movistar, a Spanish mobile phone operator, is offering a new way to learn English from the cellphone. English is becoming more important as time goes by and it gets firmly established as the world’s lingua franca. To cater for the need to learn the language, Movistar is offering a mobile service called Kantoo English, a platform that provides language lessons through multimedia messages, exercises, and tests with immediate feedback. Through this system, cellphone users can choose the rhythm that best suits them according to their daily routines, and establish the time and length of each lesson.
Lessons include information about vocabulary, grammar and idioms, together with learning tips and key phrases. To start the Kantoo English course, users have to download the application for free and pay for the service weekly, which costs around one US dollar. Movistar is currently offering the service in Spain, Mexico, Peru and Argentina, trying to cater for the population’s need to learn English.
Kantoo English is a product offered by La-Mark Vision Ltd., a company whose purpose is to expand the limits of knowledge. This course’s aim is to make English learning accessible to the largest number of people, for which an interdisciplinary group of linguists, teaching professionals, and information technology experts were needed.