Duolingo - A great tool for language learners ⭐⭐⭐

Hola. Bonjour. Salve. नमस्ते

Interested in teaching a foreign language in a fun, low-pressure way? Are your students addicted to their smartphone? Duolingo might be the app for you! Duolingo allows one to learn languages passively without making one feel stressed. It is not a stand-alone language course, but it’s an excellent addition to a language learner’s toolbox. It’s easy to use, it’s fun and it works. The website truly lets learners live the language they're learning!

The site offers courses for 30 languages, including Hindi, Spanish, English and French and each course in Duolingo is made up of modules (the circles in the screenshot below) which are grouped to form skills. Students can sign up for a Duolingo for Schools account, which is free and lets teachers link to their students' accounts and track their progress. Teachers can sign up for a free account, add class sections, and share a link with their students to let them sign up to join a particular section. Once students enrol, teachers can monitor their progress (with an overall course view or a detailed list view) and assign homework targeted for individual students' needs. Feel free to encourage all students to create their own accounts or create a single class account and use it daily for warm-ups or exit tickets. Check out the attachment on Duolingo's "Guide for leaders in education" to get a handle on how to integrate it into your classroom.

Instructional practice activities cover all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) and require students to go back and forth between the target language and their self-identified native language. Duolingo dictates the order in which you need to complete the different modules, with new modules becoming active only once you’ve completed the previous one.

What are the Lessons Like?

Each lesson in Duolingo is made up of a range of activities, such as translation:

Or this activity where you have to match words to their foreign language equivalents:

Lessons have three types of questions, each of which are designed to develop a specific language skill:

Fill-in-the-blank multiple choice
Translation (in either direction)
Write what you hear

New vocabulary is often taught with images, and grammar points are explained in little speech bubbles. There are also listening exercises where you need to type what you hear, and speaking exercises where you say what you hear.

Duolingo Helps You Target Your Weakest Words

Once you’ve finished all of the lessons in a module an additional screen appears. It shows your ‘weakest words’ that the app identified while you worked through the module.

Duolingo recognizes that language learners need to be motivated to make sure they come back to the app and engage in some more language fun. Duolingo uses several different methods to keep you hooked. The first is its goal-setting tool. The goals you can choose from vary from ‘casual’ to ‘insane’, depending on how serious you are about learning and how quickly you want to progress.

A lot of the learning that goes on in Duolingo is visual. There are pictures for learning vocabulary, colours that indicate whether you’re right or wrong, and highlighted tappable text for new words or grammar points. If you’re catering to visual learners, they are going to love it.

Making mistakes is an inevitable and essential part of language learning. The journey to fluency is often about having the courage to say things even if you know it’s not perfect. Duolingo penalises you for making the tiniest little mistake in spelling or pronunciation.

Students can also practise conversational, situational language skills in the Stories section.

Duolingo's key features -

The best thing about Duolingo, and the reason it has become so popular, is that it's free. The company's tagline is "Learn a language for free. Forever."

Duolingo smartly gamifies language learning - Gamifying courses can increase student motivation, expand student curiosity and provide real-world practice in the chosen subject. This is a sound educational strategy that makes Duolingo a great option for language teachers or anyone else who sees value in this kind of learning.
While deliberate practice is essential for any language learner, some students will need more review time than others. Duolingo facilitates this by allowing your students to repeat individual lessons or entire units of study as needed.
Students gain listening comprehension by hearing clear examples delivered by native speakers. The native speakers who narrate different portions of the app have neutral accents that are easy to understand, and being able to listen to their delivery multiple times (if desired) allows students to mimic the accent more easily.
Advanced students can practise speaking (and/or writing) skills with Duolingo’s conversation bots. Students can participate in a role-playing scenario as a customer ordering a meal in a Spanish restaurant.
The app has recently launched a complementary flashcard program called Tinycards, where students can create their own flashcards or use sets created by other Duolingo users to review geography, vocabulary, and cultural facts.
The lessons use several methods to help students understand vocabulary words, usage, verb conjugation, and other elements. Students view photos to learn terms, translate sentences back and forth between languages, and type phrases that a narrator reads aloud. If they make a mistake, they’ll see the correct answer, and their responses help the system customize future lessons. Students can also opt-out of sections if they're familiar with the material, making this an especially engaging, helpfully differentiated experience.

There is one major complaint with Duolingo and that is that there are no explanations of grammar rules. You are just supposed to pick up the rules intuitively as you go through the lessons, which are mostly multiple-choice and translation questions.

The app’s extensive resource library allows students to put their knowledge to work in a variety of settings:

Practice: Same format as lessons, but designed to integrate multiple concepts
Stories: Short dialogues to help learners improve reading and listening comprehension skills
Podcasts: Short audio stories from real-life speakers (currently only available in Spanish)
Events: Attend local meet-ups with fellow Duolingo students to develop conversational skills

The site's clear, comprehensive format serves students with a range of abilities and language experience. The game-like features -- like experience points, hearts, and streaks -- all help make the tool rewarding and addicting in equal measures. The teacher dashboard takes this progress tracking a step further and turns those scores into something meaningful and actionable for a teacher. It's easy to use this data to get a detailed, realistic sense of your students' time on task and their growing abilities across skills. Overall, this is a rigorous, appealing tool for supporting language instruction at all levels.

Duolingo review -