You are going to read a newspaper article on education. Read the text and answer the questions that follow. Decide whether each statement is True or False and provide your arguments drawn from the text to justify your choice. The proof should be given in your own words.
It’s been a few weeks since I started this journey to learn Spanish using nothing but my smartphone. And don’t get me wrong, Duolingo is a well-designed app with lots of fancy features like gamification, social media integration and even offline lessons (so I can use it on the train). But at this point I need to admit that there are some issues with trying to learn a language this way.
The biggest issue is structure, or lack thereof. Both of the foreign languages that I previously spent time learning (German and Mandarin Chinese), I learned in a classroom – at school and university. These classes provided a certain motivational structure for keeping up with your lessons. Namely, if I didn’t learn all the vocabulary for the next day’s German or Chinese lesson, my teachers Herr Belmont or Xu Laoshi would give me a seriously nasty look and I would feel ashamed. And perhaps shame’s not the best motivation tool out there, but here’s the thing – it kept me motivated.
With Duolingo, I’ve found that my initial fondness for using the app – a sort of “hooray, shiny new toy!” enthusiasm – has waned. I’ve definitely done my best to keep up using it daily, but… you know how life, work and trips to New Orleans and Las Vegas can get in the way (the Vegas trip was for work, I swear). And the issue is that (other than my editor) it doesn’t really affect anyone whether I review old lessons or press on to new ones in the app. There’s no teacher to admonish me or (perhaps more importantly) peer group to keep up with.
I think ultimately, language learning, much like language itself, might be an inherently social pursuit. There’s a very obvious facet of this, one that I actually haven’t even touched on yet – languages require speaking to other people, which is completely absent from how Duolingo works.
Really I think the social dynamic of language learning goes beyond speaking, because I actually had a somewhat similar experience a few years ago when I started going to a Mandarin tutor in Chinatown here in New York, in anticipation of a move I was about to make to Beijing, years after studying Mandarin in college.
I’d go to Mr Wu’s office once a week, and we’d have conversations reviewing the Mandarin I studied in college. And it was great, but really only during the hour I was in his office. Once I walked the few blocks out of Chinatown and back into my Mandarin-less world, I’d immediately start losing what we’d practised, and without any real community of Mandarin learners to stay on pace with, I didn’t really feel motivated to practise before the next lesson.
I’m going to keep at it for the next couple weeks with Spanish on Duolingo, but I’m a little sceptical that any person can really learn a language without other people playing a part.
1-5. Choose whether the statements are True (T) or False (F) and, to justify your choice, provide your proof from the text in your own words.
Example : (0) The statement is true because the narrator has never read a single book in the original and has not demonstrated any interest in the subject.
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1. The main problem with applications facilitating learning languages is that they don’t create the necessary conditions for consistent or regular work.
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2. The author’s teachers’ strict attitude made him dislike his lessons in a foreign language.
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3. The author doesn’t need to see if he progresses at the same rate as his fellow students.
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4. The lack of a natural communication environment discouraged the author from devoting himself to his Chinese lessons with a tutor.
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5. According to the author, even a well-designed phone application, no matter how much flexibility it gives the learning process, cannot replace human interaction.
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