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A Language Learner’s Tool-Kit

I find myself, once again, as an educator. It is a role that I have occupied many times over in my lengthening life. I like it. It challenges me. It stretches me. It invites me to think about old ideas in new ways. I have spent more time in my life as a language learner than I have as a language teacher. Oddly, I feel that it perhaps makes me more qualified, rather than less. I am often surprised to find people who teach a language to learners, but who have never actually (successfully) learned a language themselves. Most of what I know (or at least hope that I know) about learning a language comes from being a learner and reflecting on what has worked for me.

I do acknowledge that what works for one does not necessarily work for all. I do fully understand that I am in no way and by no means an expert of the matter of learning a language, any language. For these and other reasons I have embarked on a course of study that I hope will bring me more clarity on the matter. I have enrolled (for better or worse!) in a Graduate Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. It is daunting and exciting to be studying at a university level for the first time in quite a lot of years. I am just doing one module (subject) this trimester. There is no way that I could sustain a heavier study load while I am working full time, and a bit.

I am teaching two days per week in two different locations, both upwards of a hundred kilometres from home. So I teach a large mixed group (mostly English learners, some literacy and numeracy learners) on Mondays and Tuesdays and then I move locations by looping back via home overnight and teach a tiny cohort of mixed background English learners on Wednesdays and Thursdays and then I come back home to Rockhampton and do my 1 day per week of administrative tasks here, closer to home. Then every second weekend I do a couple of short shifts in the nursery, which is a welcome change of pace but a difficult imposition on my already stretched to the maximum work/study/life balance. I’ve just handed in my first assignment for the trimester and I am diligently procrastinating, while attempting to stop avoiding starting on the next.

In the meantime, suddenly my teaching prep work feels very attractive. I guess that so do most things in the face of wading through in depth linguistic articles of various levels of written quality, all of which laced with IPA phonetic symbols which I long ago forgot how to read and interpret. So, I find myself contemplating instead – or possibly alongside …. the concept of a ‘language learner toolkit’. Many people have done the same. My answers will closely resemble those of so many others before me. My point in writing this post being simply to gather my own thoughts on the matter and deposit fragments of my own thoughts here alongside chunks of the thoughts of others, on the matter.

I want to create a list of “tools” to share with my learners. I need them to be tools that will work for English learners, in this instance but my own experience will be drawn from my learning of Greek. So many, many years ago I made a multi-year attempt at learning Mandarin but to be truthful, I would not classify it as in any way successful. I don’t know exactly why my two separate experiences of language learning (the only other for me being the dismally delivered and even more disastrously received year 8 French, from my high school days) have had such vastly different outcomes – but that in itself is probably grist for the mill.

Without further ado, however, here is a short list (in no particular order) of items which I personally found very helpful in my journey towards some kind of functional fluency, in my ‘target language’ which happens to be Greek.

  1. Formal Group Lessons
  2. Reading
  3. Writing
  4. Creating flashcards for myself (both physical ones & on my phone or tablet)
  5. Language notebooks
  6. Listening to songs
  7. Duolingo (up to a point)
  8. Talking to myself (in my target language)
  9. Singing in my target language
  10. Google translate
  11. Word Reference (website/app)
  12. Innovative Languages (.com)
  13. YouTube
  14. Spotify
  15. Apple Music
  16. The ‘read out loud’ feature from an iPad screen command
  17. Ba Ba Dum (website) for very early vocab building
  18. iBooks
  19. Reading aloud, turn by turn, with my husband
  20. iTalki (website/service)
  21. Formal one on one lessons via Skype, with native speaker teachers
  22. Chat buddies, both in real time & via WhatsApp or Skype written and spoken messages
  23. Deliberately visiting restaurants, cafes & shops where my target language is spoken
  24. Making friends with strangers on public transport (though not always 100% a great idea)
  25. Locating, reading and following recipes in my target language
  26. Listening to comedy in my target language
  27. Listening to radio in my target language
  28. SBS Greek (in my case, but there are many other languages available) podcast
  29. The “Easy Greek” channel on YouTube – there are many other “easy” language channels also
  30. Language textbooks including both vocabulary and grammar, as well as cultural insights

That’s my straight out “off the top of my head” list of things that spring to mind straight away. Just lately I’ve been noticing a few really good looking tools for learners of English as a second language. Some of them make me want to go back and search for similar equivalents in Greek.

Here are some of my more recently discovered (or in some cases, rediscovered) “tips and tricks for English learners”:

  1. Youglish (just amazing for showing pronunciation variations)
  2. The International Phonetic Alphabet
  3. The BBC Grammar Gameshow
  4. Billie English
  5. The British Council for Teaching English
  6. SBS English (podcast)
  7. Children’s TV Shows
  8. English Learner Movie Guides
  9. Grammar Check: https://www.grammarcheck.net/editor/
  10. Memrise

There are so many. Memrise is an app I did have a play with in my Greek learning journey and for some reason it didn’t ‘click’ for me so I abandoned it but I do think it is possibly worth another look.

Anyway – part of the reason I wanted to jot some rough thoughts here is that I want to introduce one ‘tool’ per week to my students, this term and I know they are already aware of the most obvious ones so I am looking to dig a bit deeper and find the resources that they may not have yet uncovered.

If you are a teacher or a learner of English, or of any language for that matter, I would love to hear your thoughts about tools and techniques that work well for you and/or your learners.

Peace and salad 🙂

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