One year ago one of my classmate show me a application called
Duolingo. He told me that he practise his language skills with the
app every day. I dowloaded Duolingo to my phone and since then I have
used it for learning spanish, swedish and even little bit france.
Nowdays we have lots of electronical tools for learning and teaching
languages. We have websites, applications, learning channels and even
online groups for just helping learners with their studings. Duolingo
is nowdays one of the most popular application for language learning.
But are these applications really useful to kids?
What is Duolingo?
Duolingo is free platform that inclues app and website. In 2014 Duolingo was the first learning application to receive an honorable mention from Apple as the application of the year. Now Duolingo has over 100 000 000 users and 68 different language courses across 23 languages.
What
Duolingo offers to users?
ts and coins
while making listening, writing and speaking exercises. From stores
students can bought items to use or new versions of exercises for
practising. Students can make their own goals to website and earn
coins when they reach them. Before every lesson there will be
instruction about important new informations what students need.
Learners can also discuss sentences they do not understand with each
others and see which words they remember well and which words they
remember well. Users who study same languages can make their own
"practise-group" where to study. Teachers can also make
their own classroom to see their students
There is a link to
the classroom I made:
https://www.duolingo.com/o/mccxqz
Many students and teachers have found Duolingo useful way to learn.
Goals give motivation to students and app let learners to choose many
languages. Students can start to learn for exampel hedrew, japanese
or franch in their free time from basic level. Groups can support
each others and they can compete and talk with each others.
Why Duolingo is
good way to learn?
- Give possibily to
indepent learning
- Give possibility
to share learning
- Show language
learning funny way, give goals and motivation
- Give children
possibilities to learn also other languages
But we can also found some week spots in this way of learning. With
Duolingo there is translation and learning is
based on mistakes and correction with planned sentences. In the app,
there is not real communication. Learners are not always able to use
language anymore when context change. Even if children learn
translate and understand language better, they have might have
difficulties to express themself. Learning in Duolingo is also
happening with different courses, step by step. You need to learn
earlier topics before you can learn new ones. Even if learner would
found one topic interesting, he needs to wait until he reach this
point. This might affect to motivation. Duolingo is still only one
way to learn, and all the task are pretty similar to each others.
Person who for example found communication or storytelling
interesting might not get into the Duolingo.
What is still
missing in Duolingo?
- Real communication
- Context with using
languages out of internet
- Different ways of
learning
- Freedom to choose
topics from own interest
Duolingo and other
learning applications are improving themselfs for being better to
learners. The development from the first versions are already huge.
But as we can see, applications does not give enough to language
learning only by themself right now. These kind of applications give
a lot a good materials to classroom and it might be great idea to try
them, but they also need teachers own work and creativity
besides them. Duolingo for example is planning to add possibility to talk with people and have "languagechanging". That would be some communication added to learning.
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