Week 1

The first week of the learning challenge has been difficult but overall it’s off to a great start!

I sent off my 200 word short essay to my French NS sister and quickly received relevant feedback and constructive criticism. This feedback confirmed my need for a learning challenge to improve my grammar and vocabulary as they were particular weak points through my essay. However, I completed the essay at a higher level than I originally thought I would, giving me a bit more motivation in my ability to complete this challenge.

DuoLingo’s gamification style of learning has been so much more engaging than I expected, that I did a bit more than a week’s worth of work already! However, as this challenge progresses and I have other work and university commitments, the original standard of a level each week will be sufficiently challenging and stimulating. This week I have learned the skills Adverbs 1, Occupation and Negatives (see gold skills below).
 I have realised that my standard of a ‘level’ is different to DuoLingo’s and may not have been explained well in the proposal (see VoiceThread below for explanation).
There have also been quite a few new affordances of this app I’ve discovered that will assist in keeping me motivated throughout the challenge. Firstly, I’ve added Bronte as a friend on DuoLingo and will be able to compete against her throughout our challenges to see who gains the most XP (I’m currently winning!). Secondly, I’ve discovered the DuoLingo shop where different outfits and bonus skills can be bought with Lingots – app’s currency earned through completing lessons and levels in addition to meeting daily goals and daily streaks (see below). Thirdly (as demonstrated below), when learning new words they appear orange and underlined; when clicked their definition(s) appear. This has been particularly useful in building new vocabulary and understanding specific sentence stuctures. Fourthly (as demonstrated below), I’ve discovered the select all correct translations activity and have found it to be challenging and motivating. Finally, (on a different note), I have found evidence of the effectiveness of DuoLingo that has been demonstrated by Vesselinov and Grego (2012) to be more effective in language learning than a university language course!

Quizlet has met my expectations by offering a diverse range of new vocabulary and a fun matching activity. I firstly looked through the vocabulary from the French Intermediate 1 study set to familiarise myself with the new words. Secondly, I tested myself using the learn activity to successfully add 20 new words to my French vocabulary. Finally, I engaged with the matching activity many times until I finished in under 15 seconds 4 different times.
At first I was going to complete this matching activity a 3-4 times in under 20 seconds, however, after my first week’s experience I realised that I didn’t set the bar high enough. I will now be completing the matching activity in under 15 seconds 3-4 times per week depending on difficulty. This will allow for further consolidation of a wider range of vocabulary in a more difficult and challenging experience. I’ve set the benchmark for the rest of the challenge with my personal best of 13.4 seconds!

Facebook has been quite difficult so far trying to navigate through daily tasks. However, after a week I feel as though I’m learning many new words and am on track to meeting my goals.
 While almost every word is new to me, it has been made easier through the scaffolding of already knowing how to do most tasks. My French-English dictionary came in handy for translating new words such as évènements (events). There have also been many phrases and sentences that pop-up which give me a challenge. This is exemplified through the picture below that I hadn’t come across in the English version of Facebook. After comprehending what it was saying I realised it wasn’t relevant and closed it. 
OH, I also had a quick look in the settings (paramètres in French) for a change… I think I’ll leave that for later in the challenge! 

Changing my iPad to French has also been challenging yet rewarding. The days of the week and names of months are the first French words that appear when opening the iPad. While I’ve learned these words before I hadn’t seen them in some time. This is just one example of how useful the iPad is for contextualising new (and old) vocabulary to enhance my understanding. So far I’ve managed to send and forward emails, download apps, set reminders, navigate webpages and more, all in French. Many words however are still in English, such as the names of most apps, which is making navigating my iPad more manageable than I expected. 

Overall, I have been particularly happy that all four of my technologies have been using a range of new vocabulary at the same time. I didn’t expect this from DuoLingo and Quizlet especially as they seemed to be quite different in terms of focussed vocabulary. I believe this has assisted in minimising the potential constraints of these technologies by putting the newly acquired vocabulary into context. Additionally, the combination of these technologies has proved to be effective in catering for my multimodal style of learning which is keeping me motivated and sufficiently challenged. Furthermore, the nature of the activities has also catered for my analytical and authority-orientated language learning styles. 

À la semaine prochaine!