Drama and Duolingo

This is a personal reflection sparked by Dragan Miladinovic’s recent blog post on drama activities and chunks in language teaching. It made me think back to an interesting journey of my own.

It all started back in 2022 when I taught an A2 German class at Kempten University. I started out somewhat enthusiastically, happy to be back in an in-person classroom after teaching almost exclusively online for about two years.

So in the first lesson I asked my students – there must have been about 8 or 9 of them – to line up in order of how long they‘d been studying German. As you can probably tell, I was using sociometry to incorporate a low-key embodied activity.

I then asked them to tell the whole class how long they‘d been learning German: a year, a few months, two years… But one answer really baffled me. One student said: 255 days.  I asked him how he knew so exactly and he explained that he‘d been studying German on Duolingo, which keeps track of how long you have been learning.

I had heard of the app before, but this got my attention. As I learned, my student was entirely self-taught (or perhaps app-taught), but was doing remarkably well in my A2-class. Being from the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium probably helped, as his mother-tongue is, after all, somewhat close to German. Still, I was impressed. After the lesson I asked him to show me how the app worked and he gave me a mini-tutorial.

A few weeks later, my enthusiasm for using embodied and playful approaches with this group had begun to wane as attendance dwindled. I had also noticed that most participants had been slightly bewildered by my attempts to make lessons playful and embodied. And I wondered if my use of drama might have contributed to their disappearing from my classes… (Later on, I realized that this diseappearing of students was – more or less – the new normal, but that is a topic for another post.)

As the semester wore on, only two students remained.

Guess who one of them was? Right, the self-taught Belgian student.

The other was a student from Ghana, who seemed to have a much harder time with German. Unlike many other university students, who are often highly proficient in English, his more limited English meant I couldn‘t use it as a bridge to explain tricky grammar or vocab issues in German. French wasn‘t an option either for him and I did not speak any of his other languages.

Of course, I had taught learners from a wide range of home countries before, from Argentina to Vietnam. But now more than ever I tried to imagine how it might feel learning a language with no obvious similarities with your mother tongue or any of the other languages you are fluent in.

SoI downloaded Duolingo and started learning… Arabic and Welsh.

One choice was holiday-related, as I’d been to Snowdonia a couple of times, the other job-related, but both were certainly very far from any Germanic or Romance language that I‘d studied before. (Though I still maintain that Welsh has some words that are kind of close to Latin!?)

While Welsh was more of a fun side quest that I abandoned after a few weeks, I persisted with Arabic for much longer. I can still hardly string together a sentence, let alone read or write it, but I think the experience definitely increased my empathy for language learners who are baffled by German or English.

Since then I also have given Ukrainian a try and currently I am working on acquiring a few basics of Turkish vocabulary and grammar – reflecting the home languages of students I have worked with in recent years.

While I have not really dared to integrate these actively in my teaching, all three – (Arabic, Ukrainian and Turkish)  have taught me one thing: When my students produce sentences without a verb – which they frequently do – it is not necessarily because they are lazy. Their home languages may simply work differently and, in some cases, get do perfectly weel without an explicitly expressed verb!

And even if you can‘t actually speak their home language, you might at least be able to figure out if your students are discussing bread or teachers: two small successes I‘ve had while eavesdropping on my Turkish-speaking students…

So, in a roundabout way, using a drama activity sparked my Duolingo journey as well as a deeper understanding of some of my students‘ learning struggles and Dragan‘s example is a great reminder how both drama-based learning and staying curious about other languages should remain part of my approach to teaching.