Like a collection game!—Duolingo

Like a collection game!—Duolingo

Source:https://www.duolingo.com/

'Crown by Crown'

Lessons are designed in fix sequences, but each sector of the lessons got its own reflective review and question part. This is quite new to me. Duolingo is the best English self-learning app for me. 

1. How does it work?

Just like many other education apps, if you want more features in Duolingo, you need to pay for a subscription. However, based on my own experience, the basic version is good enough. Duolingo has more than English courses, in fact, it has a huge content base. It has different languages courses for different language users. That will be a big amount of courses. However, they designed their courses to be very accurate and explicit. The language course is made of many small chapters (see in Pic 1). 

Picture 1
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/

As for how to use your course? Before you start, there you will be a small test to see if you need to jump a few chapters. Then you just need to click on your chapter and start to learn the knowledge in this chapter. The language knowledge will be displayed in both text and audio (see in Pic 2). After some rounds of knowledge input, there will be some review or test for the previous knowledge (see in Pic 3). One of the advantages of this app is their feedback and mistake review system (see in Pic 4). All the mistakes you have done maybe repeated in the last part of the chapter.  The higher the mark you get, the more crowns you will get. With enough crowns, you can proceed to the next level. 

Picture 2
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/en/Time/1

Picture 3
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/en/Time/1

Picture 4
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/en/Time/1

2. Other features

There are also many other interesting features of Duolingo. For example, this app will record your learning process and make it into a time schedule (see in Pic 5) to show you the study you have done and the place you can be better. Another interesting part is its discussion area. This discussion area (see in Pic 6) is more like a forum; everyone can post their interesting findings and possible confusions towards their target language. I noticed that this forum has been running quite well. Learners are very positive to post their opinions in this place.

Picture 5
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/

Picture 6
Source: https://www.duolingo.com/

3. Comments

From my own perspective as an English learner, if I want to improve my English skills by myself, this app will be on my list. It's very easy and useful, not to mention that it's basically free. Furthermore, the social network in this app also provides learners with more opportunities to practice the target language with each other. There are several flaws that I have to mention about this app: 1. It lacks grammar knowledge. This can be harmful to beginner learners. 2. The difficulty of this app is not appropriate for advanced learners. It's too easy for them.

This is the eighth Episode for Simon's ICT blog.

Hope to give you some useful information for teaching English with technology.

See you next episode!!!

20/03/2019