<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Angela and Kumalie,<br><br>It depends a lot on what kind of learners you have and what they hope to achieve. Are they adults or children? Are they heritage speakers or total outsiders to the language? Do they want to learn useful phrases, grammar, or do they want to expand their existing vocabulary? Are they literate in their first language? <br><br>Most of the offerings out there (even Duolinguo, despite the way it sells itself) only really provide translation-based vocab training. If your learners don’t read English comfortably, or the platform doesn’t allow you to change the language of instruction to one they can read, then it won’t be very useful. And in the case of Duolinguo, it’s not even designed to be an open platform that you can contribute languages to – even if you did manage to convince them to work on an Arrernte course, it may be difficult for the language community to maintain ownership and control over the process. Memrise, on the other hand, allows contributions from anyone in any language, but is even more exclusively driven by translation-based vocab training. And if you are trying to teach young kids, they're probably not going to be very excited by flashcard-based apps for long, no matter how shiny and colourful. Even for adults, staying committed to regular practice of a new language is always a struggle, with or without an app (as I’m sure everyone here knows!). These flashcard apps work best when they support a larger learning pathway (including speaking practice, learning grammar, etc), rather than when they are just used in isolation.<br><br>However, if you do want to go down the flashcard road, it might be worth taking a look at Anki, which is (like Memrise) a so-called ‘spaced repetition system’. It’s much uglier to look at than Memrise, but it’s more flexible, allowing flashcards where you have to fill the blanks (which can be useful for teaching grammar), or where you have a picture or video on one side and a word to learn on the other (which means you don’t have to rely on translation). It’s also open source, so if you have the funding you could get a developer to take Anki’s basic system and then design an interface that suits your particular needs, and you wouldn’t have to pay Anki anything for it. <br><br>If you’re looking for some non-flashcard ideas, when I was working in the Wubuy revitalisation program at Numbulwar school I prototyped a few web-based video games for teaching kinship terms, verb prefixes, directions and so forth – shoot me an email if you would like to take a look. (They can all be freely adapted for other languages too)<br><br>Hope that helps,<br><br>Peter</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 4:12 PM Angela Harrison <<a href="mailto:angela.harrison@batchelor.edu.au">angela.harrison@batchelor.edu.au</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal">We are looking at investing some funds to create online language lessons in Arrernte. We have looked at a few platforms and are interested to hear feedback from others in the language teaching world as to their experiences.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We have looked at <b>‘Memrise’</b> – which looks good from the point of view of accessibility, ease of use and vocabulary learning, however we would like something which is more sophisticated and allows learners to learn to build sentences.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>‘Say something in’</b> <span style="color:black">looks like it uses a lot of the same principles as master-apprentice, like focussing on intensive speaking and listening rather than reading and writing. This one has the advantage that
the learner can listen and repeat without needing to look, which is great for using on car trips, or while bike riding or walking.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color:black">‘Duolingo’</span></b><span style="color:black"> appeals the most to Kumalie Riley, Arrernte teacher, who says it is most like the Arrernte teaching she is familiar with in that it uses flashcards and has a focus
on speaking and listening as well as reading and writing.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black">We have tried to contact both Duolingo and Say Something In but have received no communication in response.
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black">We are interested to hear the experiences of others – is it likely that we will hear back from them? Has anyone had experience with putting a language into one of these platforms?
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black">Thanks,<br>
Angela and Kumalie<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:rgb(80,80,80)">Regards
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:rgb(203,87,10)">Angela Harrison<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:rgb(80,80,80)">Project Manager</span></i><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:rgb(80,80,80)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:rgb(80,80,80)">Desert Peoples Centre Campus<br>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Peter Nyhuis<br><br></span></div><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Language Documentation Lab<br></span><div><div><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"><span><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">School of Languages and Linguistics</span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The University of Melbourne</span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Parkville VIC 3010</span></div></span></span><br></div></div></div></div>