Final week!

This is the last post and what a journey it has been! I don't even need to change my Facebook and iPad back to English as I am able to understand it all. Plus, when new features are discovered in the future they will act as further learning experiences.

This week I was highly engaged in the course content as I was able to relate to using translation as a learning strategy from when I was on exchange in Brazil. The grammar translation method (GTM) however, appears to be a very outdated and disengaging pedagogical practice for 21st century learners. Although, I can see its relevance from the era starting in the late 1700s. I can imagine that it wouldn't be expected that students could access environments with NS like they can now with exchanges, holidays, etc. For this reason there was probably more of a focus on 'pen pals' and similar learning experiences which would require only writing and translating. As demonstrated by Cook (2010), translation in language teaching has often been associated with traditional pedagogies such as focussing on form, accuracy, artificiality, declarative knowledge and authoritarian teaching. In contrast to the contemporary focus on meaning, fluency, authenticity, procedural knowledge and collaborative learning (Cook, 2010). Despite GTMs outdatedness and criticism in contemporary classrooms, there are still advantages of using translation in language teaching. As demonstrated by Gnutzmann (2009) translation in language classes can effectively teach forms and structures, assists in comprehension development, further develops one’s mother tongue and increases learners’ knowledge about language and their language awareness to develop conscious and linguistically aware language learners. What’s more interesting is that some researchers believe we need to re-evaluate and re-adopt translation in language learning as they believe it is more important in our technologically rich 21^st century (Dagiliene, 2012; Witte, Harden & Harden, 2012). Additionally, we now have technologies in classrooms that would make for authentic and engaging application of translation practices (Witte et al., 2012).
Personally, I believe that there is a place for translation as a pedagogical practice in language classrooms with and without the aid of technologies. This is due to the high use of digital translators out of classrooms as a learning strategy. This is a strategy I’ve always used and used in depth in Brazil to assist my development of Portuguese. I found Google Translator a much more useful tool than dictionaries and phrasebooks and it is far quicker and has the ability to demonstrate pronunciation and effective use of conjugations. Additionally, incidental learning is often evident through the use of Google Translate as there is often things that are learned about words/phrases that were not the aim when using the tool.

Now that I've shared my love for Google Translate I’ll focus on my technologies and final week of my challenge.
DuoLingo’s goals have all been met, but this will not be the end of our time together! I have reached the next checkpoint which ended up being my main goal in the end, however there is still a final set of skills to learn to master the app and ultimately the language! I had to complete 2 skills to reach this goal, but I also completed a third skill, Flirting, as I was interested to see what it had to offer. The ‘core’ skills I learnt this week were Irregular Plurals and People. The Irregular Plurals skills was more difficult than I expected and required substantial use of the explanations section to understand. However, I was already quite confident with the People skill as it is something that is often focussed on in language classes. The Flirting skill was quite ridiculous in the end, but of course that was expected from the beginning. As you can see below, I learned how to say phrases such as vous me plaisez – I have a crush on you & vous etes mannequin? – Are you a model?
Despite these phrases being quite useless, I did learn a lot of vocabulary relating to love, beauty, going out, etc. Although I achieved all my goals relating to DuoLingo, I am still quite far behind Bronte and Melanie, as I am sure their focus must have been on DuoLingo rather than a range of technologies. Nevertheless, my overall learnt vocabulary, as demonstrated by DuoLingo (2015) is……………. 880 words!!! I am extremely happy with this end result and can happily say I learnt a huge range of French vocabulary from using DuoLingo over the last 5 weeks. The parts of speech I learnt include verbs, proper nouns, pronouns, prepositions, numerals, nouns, interjections, determiners, conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives and others that are unspecified.
It may be apparent that the focus on learning grammar became a little overtaken by vocabulary throughout my challenge. As evidenced by the amount of words I learnt, it is hopefully a bit clearer as to why I was unable to focus on both the language proficiencies to the same extent. I do however feel more confident in reading, writing and creating sentences using a range of new vocabulary in the correct grammatical style. This is only possible because of the various activities offered by DuoLingo that allowed me to focus on both competencies and practice their correct uses.
Overall, I would rate DuoLingo a 4/5 for its French vocabulary and grammar development effectiveness. I will definitely be using this app again in the future to finish the French module and possibly complete the Portuguese and Spanish modules as well. I will keep posted to see when they add an Indonesian module as I would be very motivated to learn that through DuoLingo to then use in context during a surfing holiday.

For the final week of Quizlet I selected a study set of surfing vocabulary for some extra motivation, I originally planned to compete the 5^th part of French Intermediate 1, however it became apparent that this study set does not exist! The surfing study set was very enjoyable and included vocabulary such as waves, surfers, boards and water. As I was not very familiar with many of the words it took me quite some time to achieve 15 seconds and below 3 times. However, I finally did so in 15, 14 and 13.4 seconds. This means that my overall personal best for this challenge was the 11.4 seconds I achieved in week 3. Considering I originally planned to achieve a score under 20 seconds this is a great accomplishment. Upon completion, this means I have achieved my goals set out in my proposal for Quizlet, and even surpassed them.
Overall, I was quite happy with Quizlet’s vocabulary choices to suit my language level. I enjoyed the gamification style of matching the correct vocabulary and consequently learnt a lot. I still think this app could have better complimented DuoLingo if the vocabulary was similar week to week. If I were to do a similar challenge in the future I would find a study set that matches the skills in DuoLingo that I engage with and use Quizlet’s matching game to compliment the DuoLingo skills. Even so, I would give Quizlet 3/5 for its effectiveness and focus on developing vocabulary.

On Facebook this week I made sure I was able to understand everything possible that I would come across in the future using the app. I looked through the parametres (settings) that in the beginning of the challenge looked very scary! I clicked through all the settings and was able to understand how to change them if I needed to. To consolidate this knowledge I posted a link to my profile for friends to sign up to Uber, which would give me free credit to use it in the future. However, I didn’t want ALL of my friends to see that I posted it as I don’t usually like posting such tacky things. So, I filtered through the privacy and sharing settings to only have it visible by friends I would catch Uber taxis with. It was easier than I thought it would be and consolidated my comfort in using Facebook in French from now on. This means that I achieved my goals in Facebook by being able to understand everything in French unassisted.
Overall I would give Facebook a 3/5 for its effectiveness in vocabulary and grammar language learning. More specifically, I would give it a 2.75 for grammar and a 3.25 for vocabulary, averaging out to 3/5.

As I have been using all the above technologies on my iPad I feel very comfortable using it in French from now on. I have successfully completed the goal of being able to understand everything unassisted. However, I believe I achieved this goal last week as I haven’t had any difficulties since then with anything. I am even confident in changing any of the settings, unless it is to an unfamiliar language of course!
Overall I would give my iPad a 3.5/5 for vocabulary learning. It would achieve higher if there were more examples of contextualising the learnt vocabulary and grammar through the other technologies. However, I am very happy that I am able to navigate and understand everything after only 5 weeks. Of course my prior knowledge of French as well as using it in English greatly assisted in this component of the challenge.  

Finally, I will briefly review the feedback from my NS sister after completing my second 200 word essay on the topic of travel. She was very impressed with my second attempt and noted the improvements in using a more diverse range of vocabulary as well as less grammatical errors. She made a note that she was even more pleased that I had correctly included accents, unlike the first attempt. I believe this is due to DuoLingo’s cruel philosophy of failing an activity when accents are absent! However, even though I have greatly improved I still have room for further learning. My sister made notes of areas I could have used more descriptive language, such as describing the features of a place I want to visit. I believe by completing the rest of the French DuoLingo module I will be able to do so. Additionally, now that I’ve focussed on grammar and vocabulary it would be a good idea to work on my listening and speaking, thankfully both of which are also offered by DuoLingo!

As stated last week, by choosing my own Quizlet study set I would hopefully see improvement in similar vocabulary across all technologies. However, as I focussed on a surfing study set this was not the case. But I don’t think of this negatively as I have in previous weeks. As there was less to focus on using my iPad and Facebook, by already achieving the goals, I was happy to engage with a further range of vocabulary, especially when it meets my interests as a learner. As evidenced throughout this challenge the combination of these technologies has proven to be extremely effective in catering for my multimodal style of learning which kept me motivated and sufficiently challenged. Furthermore, the nature of the activities successfully catered for my analytical and authority-orientated language learning styles.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this language learning challenge and learnt far more than I anticipated. By discovering DuoLingo especially, I will be continuing to develop my French in my spare time with continued motivation from my followers and meeting daily goals. This challenge has also developed my learning potential in other academic areas through the use of critical reflection. Stay tuned for the possibility of more learning documentation in the future!
Bye for now, but not forever!

Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching: An argument for reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dagilienė, I. (2012). Translation as a Learning Method in English Language Teaching. Studies About Languages, (21), 124-129.

DuoLingo. (2015). French words learned. Retrieved from https://www.duolingo.com/words

Gnutzmann, C. (2009). Translation as Language Awareness. Translation in second Language Learning and Teaching, 53-77.

Witte, A., Harden, T., & Harden, A. R. O. (2012). Translation in second language learning and teaching. Peter Lang.