The system tracks your progress and lets you know when you’ve memorized a new word. Learning looks like this: you choose the video from the FluentU library, watch it with subtitles and embedded translation, create flashcards, and take related quizzes. Who doesn’t enjoy YouTube videos? FluentU puts them to use by turning fun content into fantastic language learning materials.įluentU teaches students lots of vocabulary and emphasizes listening comprehension. This app satisfies our greatest passion – procrastination. One of the best language learning apps in the industry. Feel free to use the format you’re most comfortable with and encourage your students to do the same.

Language Apps to Use as Course MaterialsĪll platforms I’ll be sharing are available as apps or website versions (some also as desktop ones). Let’s move to some more interesting stuff. Canva for presentations (I don’t know about your students, but mine consider PowerPoint a stone-age tool).

Discord and Slack for communication with parents (they feel more professional than Facebook groups).

Loom and Screencastify for brief video explanations and feedback.

Actually, they’ve been my magic wands for the last five years as I’ve been changing countries more frequently than some change linens. Many apps not initially devised to facilitate language teaching turned out to be real gems during COVID lockdowns. After years of trial and error, I’m ready to share the crème de la crème apps for us, language educators, and our dear students. As soon as I got my first teaching experience, I made technology, including language learning apps, an inseparable component of my lessons. Technological or not, I burned the midnight oil learning languages (this one’s just an expression – we did have electricity in my childhood).Īs a language teacher, I’ve always tried to save students from boredom. Luckily, I was kind of a boring nerd myself.

I don’t blame them – that’s a lame activity.

Writing new words on the chalkboard bored them to death. No wonder many kids back in my day – and I’m not even that old – hated foreign language lessons. On the rare occasions when my teacher brought me a video cassette with the original movie, I couldn’t help but jump for joy. I started learning foreign languages with no access to technology. Is Language Learning Without Technology Even Fun?

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