Week 4: Autonomy and Digital Literacy

What is Duolingo?

The homepage for Duolingo website.

Duolingo is an online language-learning platform that includes a website and mobile app. According to its website, Duolingo is the most downloaded education app in the world, with more than 300 million users. It is so popular that there are plenty of funny parody videos made about Duolingo such as this one from the famous American show - Saturday Night Live (SNL):

[Source: YouTube - 'SNL: Duolingo for talking to Children']

Duolingo co-founders are Luis von Ahn and Severin Hackers. 

Duolingo's founders: Luis Von Ahn and Severin Hackers.
[Photo from Forbes.com -'Duolingo takes online teaching to the next level, by crowd sourcing new languages' ]

Currently, you can learn 23 different languages using Duolingo – isn’t that amazing? I’m sure that more languages will be added into its platform in the future.

So many languages for learners to choose from.

How can language teachers use Duolingo?

In my opinion, as an English language teacher and a user of Duolingo (I’m currently learning Spanish using Duolingo!), I believe that Duolingo is a useful language-learning tool that can be used as a supplement to a language course but it does not stand alone. As a teacher, I would recommend Duolingo to my students who have the motivation to learn the language on their own and want to have the extra practice outside of the classroom.

Encouraging our learners to use online-learning language platforms such as Duolingo is important because it creates the opportunity for learners to learn about the target language beyond the school hours. This is important especially in second-language classroom context where learners only learn the language as a subject at school for several hours and don’t really have much opportunity to be exposed to the target language outside of the lesson. In addition to that, by using this kind of app, we are encouraging and training our students to be more invested in their own learning; which is an important step in fostering them to become autonomous language learners.

Language teachers now have the option to use online-learning apps such as
 Duolingo as supplementary language learning tool for their learners.
[Source: image by dschap from Pixabay]

Strengths

  1.     Duolingo is a great language-learning tool for autonomous learners who have strong motivation to study and learn languages on their own. According to Dörnyei (1994), motivation is one of the key factors that determines the success of second or foreign language learning. I strongly recommend language teachers to use Duolingo alongside their language lesson with their learners who are motivated to do the extra works to improve their language proficiency in their own free time. As users, you will have the option to set the amount of time that you want to spend learning languages using Duolingo. The platform will then automatically send personal reminders to your phone/computer based on the preferences that you have set.

[Source: YouTube - A funny 'Introducing Duolingo Push' ad]

2.     According to its website, “Duolingo is designed to feel like a game and scientifically proven to be effective”. I think this is a strong and positive feature of Duolingo. The colourful and appealing visual interface, cute cartoon characters (the adorable owl mascot), and the use of ‘crowns’, ‘gems’ and ‘hearts’ as digital currency for language learners to earn and collect will inevitably make them forget that they are actually learning instead of playing a language game. 

The element of gamification in Duolingo.

Of course, just like any other online games, you can compete with other language learners and see how well you did on the scoreboard (Duolingo calls it ‘Leaderboards’). This create a healthy sense of competition among the learners to compete, thus consequently helps in motivating them as autonomous language learners.

Duolingo creates a fun and engaging language learning experience for its users similar to other online games.

3.     It is easy to use and learners can ‘play’ it on the go anywhere when they have the spare moment – in the train, bus or whilst waiting for a cab. Also, each lesson only takes a maximum of 5 to 10 minutes which is not a huge commitment for any users to commit to.

4.     Duolingo is of course – FREE! You just need to sign up and create an account to use it. Once you have tried it and if you think it is an excellent tool to use for language learning, you can choose to upgrade to Duolingo Plus which is the paid version that offers you more cool and interesting features and benefits.

Limitation

1.     In order to gain the benefits of learning languages using Duolingo, learners must be diligent and have the self-discipline to use the app on their own. They must have the motivation to complete the task given and manage their time responsibly.

2.     As the lessons pile on, some learners might find it uninteresting and monotonous. The grammar-translation method is useful but can be quite dull after some time especially if you prefer the communicative way of learning languages. Trust me, I have lost count on how many time Duolingo have asked me to translate the same repetitive phrases in Spanish (‘Yo soy un hombre’ – I am a man!).

Too much of grammar-translation method and drilling practice?

3.     With Duolingo, it might not get you to the fluency level like an expert speaker but it will help you to get to a basic level as a language learner. Again, if you are learning a language with proficiency as your main aim, you should use it as a supplementary learning tool in addition to going for language classes and practising talking with other speakers of the target language.

4.     The features and functions of the free version are rather limited and basic in comparison to the paid version. Cost is definitely an important point to consider here.

Duolingo: yea or nay?

As a language teacher, I don’t think that Duolingo will replace real-time classroom language lesson anytime soon but I do view it as a valuable and useful supplementary language-learning tool to be used alongside my lessons with my learners. Both young and adult learners will definitely love the fun, playful and engaging aspects of learning language using Duolingo. As a language teacher or educator, what is your opinion about online language-learning tools such as Duolingo? I’m interested to hear more from you. Thank you for reading my post and please leave a comment below and let me know!

References:

Dörnyei, Z. (1994). Motivation and motivating in the foreign language classroom. The modern language journal. 78(3), pp.273-284.