[RNLD] List or review of language apps

[Mat Bettinson]

On 23 February 2017 at 20:08, John Hobson <john.hobson at sydney.edu.au> wrote:

It would be of great interest if someone were to undertake empirical
> research on the effectiveness of these apps.


The great majority of language apps so far are either dictionaries or some
kind of flash-card based memory app. I don't think we really consider
dictionaries as something that can be measured stand-alone. In terms of
flash-card stuff, it's enormously well studied to the extent of refining
algorithms to achieve better results (do a lit search on spaced
repetition). However this learning is a pretty narrow slice of language as
you pointed out.

For myself, flash cards taught me how to read Chinese. They teach medical
students all that biochemical stuff they need to learn. It's good at
discrete things that just need to be memorised and particularly, I would
say, for people that are highly motivated to use them consistently and
correctly. However the majority of people that use flash card apps don't
use them like this. They tend to think they will work to learn something
over a shorter period of time and without the repetition that the method
depends upon. In some work on the side, I investigated the role of flash
cards for undergraduate students of Chinese.* This is quite different from
self-motivated use of indigeonous language apps. While the nuts and bolts
of the apps are the same, students in this context are focused on literacy,
where as I've seen dictionary and flashcard apps for Australian languages
be more front and center with audio recordings, as they should be.

One thing I can annecdotally report as being particularly helpful, is in
using mobile devices as a response to the shortage of face-to-face teacher
time. I had students form groups and perform dialogs which they would
record and upload. Teachers would listen and provide feedback via the
university's voice-based marking systems. No custom app required.
Unquestionably there were positive outcomes but you'd expect that more
production and more teacher feedback would do that. Spoiler alert: Pretty
much every CALL paper ever finishes with a conclusion that the digital tool
X should be used as  part of a programme and not by itself.

The big problem we have with language apps right now is that they've fallen
into a bit of rut as far as genres go. But there's been some great work on
this in the last year! The tools summit in Melbourne and an app workshop in
Darwin. There were some seriously great ideas that came out of that. It's
hard to work out how on earth we'll ever be able to build it but still, I
think we *can* do more than dictionary and flashcard apps, and we should.

It just so happens that I'm in Hawaii now and about to present a
bleeding-edge mobile language app based on the social sharing of recipes,
called Zahwa**. The point here is that people take their own images and
video and record themselves, or their elder generation, and share these.
Zahwa facilitates translating of these recipes, similar to the older Aikuma
Android app.

Apps like Zahwa, based on the social sharing and - hopefully - learning, is
an exciting avenue much more closely tied to language exposure and language
production we I'm sure we all agree is much more likely to result in
meaningful outcomes. Zahwa isn't really a learning app, but you wouldn't
need to do much to do it to do this. Imagine going through a set of slides
once listening to them in language, then you have to go back again and
record your own.

The argument we're presenting here in Hawaii is for common data models so
one app that's about sharing feeds data into another app for learning. Oh,
and there might be something in it for linguists too :)

Anyway, I agree we should be skeptical of learning outcomes of the sort of
apps that around around so far. I just had to get my oar in so we don't tar
all 'apps' with the same brush. It's exciting times right now. I'd like to
have the opportunity to return to my previous work and do something more
directly with language learning. We'll see.

Probably come back and plug Zahwa later, but I couldn't pass up on this
convo.

*
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/AG1dBvTLgrDGi9?domain=academia.edu
*
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/38LEBkSGbNdlTE?domain=academia.edu

** To give you an idea about *why* things like Ionic are the bees knees,
this here link will launch our app on your phone and pull down a rather
large Moose Stew recipe as spoken by one of the last dozen or so speakers
of the Maa language in Alaska. Takes a while to pull down the 35mb audio,
so don't panic if you're just looking at the app. I'll whack in a progress
display soon. If you get bored waiting, just click the icon bottom right,
log in, and make your own recipes (or any procedural discourse).
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/q0YmBAtvmVaeiq?domain=zahwa.aikuma.org
(I have no idea if it works on an iPhone, let me know :)

-- 
Regards,

Mat Bettinson
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/resource-network-linguistic-diversity/attachments/20170303/f506ce3b/attachment.htm>