Mobile apps my students actually use for SLA

Duolingo

Thanks to a lot of hard work and millionaire-inventor-backing, Duolingo has graduated into a league of its own among language apps. There is little I could say about Duolingo that hasn't been said elsewhere. However, as I explained last week, Duolingo is in the process of rolling out some truly fantastic teacher tools. Just this morning, I got an email telling me how much XP each of my "enrolled" students have earned this week and their total XP. It's the little features though, like the ability to download several lessons in advance while on wifi, that make Duolingo so handy.

Flashcard apps - Brainscape, Memrise, Babbel, Quizlet

This might not be hip with the applied linguistics crowd, but I like flashcards. With the large number of features you'll find in these successful flashcard apps, I don't doubt that you'll quickly decide on one that works for you. Brainscape is my go-to for self-directed learners and my own learning, while Quizlet is what I use for my classes. Brainscape can get pricey if you go in for pre-made flashcard decks, but the content curation is excellent so I have shelled out for a few, such as the Spanish Sentence Builder. On the other hand, Quizlet's web interface is fantastic for adding custom decks and sharing them, which some of my students had a hard time doing on Brainscape. For my classes, I make a Quizlet deck before I hand out new reading, and then provide them with a link to the sample randomized vocab quiz similar to the one they'll have to take in class. They can diagnose their level of familiarity with the vocab and get personalized feedback before they take the real thing, which I found is a big deal for high school freshmen and sophomores. In French 4, I tested 100 new vocabulary items a week for several weeks in a row without any major hiccups or mutiny. The other two apps, Memrise and Babel are good alternatives for people looking for a new way into flashcard study, and include a variety of question types. Memrise tends to have better free vocabulary lists than Quizlet, although my students warn me that there are some errors, whereas Babbel might easily be described as Duolingo Jr. All four of the apps mentioned here have some degree of audio and photo integration and large content-producing user bases, so you really can't go wrong!

Dictionaries - WordRef, Larousse French-English, Antidote, WordMagic, WordMagic Slang

For online app dictionaries, there is no substitute for WordRef, primarily due to the site's active forums, intercultural spheres unlike most others on the web. For speed, I also use a variety of offline app dictionaries. While Larousse ($5) has won me over for French-English, Antidote is a model of what a unilingual dictionary app can be. Every time I open Antidote, I feel as though I'm taking a deep dive into the French language, through etymology timelines, usage examples, collocations, and even a stylistics guide. In my vain search for an equivalent Spanish dictionary app, I discovered WordMagic, which, unlike Larousse, allows you to type either English or Spanish into the search bar and displays all results with corresponding country flags, cutting down on search time by a full second. The "jump" button also brings you to the next part of speech within the entry, for example, from "care; verb" to "care; noun." WordMagic Slang is a delightful parallel app that functions the same way with a separate, very up-to-date lexicon, the likes of which I have yet to find for French.

News Apps - BBC Mundo, Le Point, News in Slow Spanish - Latino

While teaching AP French, my favorite zero-prep assignment was to ask students to journal about a news article discovered in the French media. Because mobile articles (such as those found on BBC Mundo and Le Point) are shorter and designed to be read quickly, they make ideal homework for language learners. But, if you have a medium-sized budget, you can take the study of the news one step further thanks to the News in Slow French and News in Slow Spanish (European or Latino available) weekly podcasts. The minimum subscription ($35/six months) gets you 20 minutes a week of high-quality audio about current events along with a vocabulary sheet that you can print out for your students or turn into a vocab quiz. My typical weekend assignment with News In Slow French asked students to 1) listen to the podcast, 2) choose a story that interested them, 3) write a summary of the story that answers the questions of who-what-where-when-why. After a few weeks, I saw a huge improvement in listening comprehension skills, and there was always something to talk about on Monday.