Traffic policemen in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, learn English on smartphones to better help an increasing number of international tourists.

Peer motivation

Just as the traditional classroom environment helps creates peer pressure among students, the English-teaching apps tried to recreate similar motivations by encouraging people to share their progress on social networks.

"I intended to enhance my English proficiency for a long time. But it was not until I saw more people begin to share their learning experiences on WeChat that I began to take any action," says Sheng Qian, a postgraduate student of journalism at Peking University.

One day she noticed several of her friends sharing their English-learning app experiences on the popular social networking platform. One of her friends said he has been reading English novels on Mint Reading for 19 days, finishing 19,876 words in total. And the next day, she found that his reading word count had again increased.

"It seems everyone is making progress day by day. I don't want to be left behind," says the 24-year-old.

Influenced by her peers who began to study English on various smartphone apps, she jumped on the bandwagon in December.

She spent 628 yuan to purchase courses on both Liulishuo and Mint Reading, a small program installed on WeChat by Baicizhan, which promises to help users to finish reading three English novels within a hundred days.

The novels are mostly English classics, such as Jane Eyre and The Call of the Wild. Reading unabridged English versions of those books may sound daunting to many Chinese students, but the course divides them into short episodes of around 10-minute segments of daily reading.

Another online English-course app popular among Sheng and her friends is Cheese Pie Listening, which focuses on enhancing people's listening skills by studying English movies without subtitles. Courses are also split into small segments, which can be finished in less than 20 minutes and delivered to users every morning, making it convenient for them to make full use of their fragmented time.

As long as users finish their assignments every day and share the results with friends on the social platform, the companies will send them gifts, including the original English books.

"It is good to practice every day," says Sheng, adding that she found herself becoming more generous toward different types of English courses.

Even Chinese internet users who are accustomed to free content and normally reluctant to pay for things online, now find themselves paying for English learning apps.