German tutor puts social networking tool to work
02 December 2011
Boosting success in learning a foreign language may be just a mouse click away in the Facebook options menu, University of Canterbury senior tutor Vera Leier has found.
Senior Tutor Vera Leier
Boosting success in learning a foreign language may be just a mouse click away in the Facebook options menu, University of Canterbury senior tutor Vera Leier has found.
In an attempt to make learning German more engaging, Ms Leier set up a Facebook page for her second-year German class. The twist was that everyone had to change the language settings of their Facebook account to German, and they were allowed to use only German on the class page.
“I wanted to make it more authentic. I wanted the students to feel more German, to use it more naturally, to be immersed in it. Students who don’t like learning that much suddenly learn without realising it.”
She said she chose Facebook over other social networking sites because in a pre-class survey every student said they used it. She then told her students to invite German-speaking friends to the page and, once they started joining it, she handed administrator status over to the students and stepped back.
“You can make all the students administrators. The teacher is way in the background and the students can do their work. I think it makes the students much more motivated and empowers them.”
Part of the class involved working in groups of three to four to make a five-minute movie in German for a film competition in Wellington run by the Goethe Institut (a German language institution). These videos were posted on the class Facebook page and critiqued by other students in German.
Facebook was useful, she said, because it allowed easy linking to other sites, making posting the students’ videos on YouTube then linking to them through Facebook simple.
“It’s not like the olden days where if you have a movie file it takes half a day to upload it onto a website. With Facebook you just click it and it’s a few minutes. It’s a wonderful platform for teaching.”
The experiment seems to have produced results, with examination marks showing “quite a lot” of improvement compared to previous years, particularly among the weaker students. Ms Leier said she planned to continue using social networking sites as a teaching tool, though she would need to keep up-to-date with which sites students were using in case Facebook falls out of favour.
Another benefit of the class page was that her students bonded much more strongly than she had seen in her past 15 years at the University.
“It was the most bubbly and lovely class I’ve ever had. It made a very close-knit class which I’ve never had before. Having Facebook 24/7 in their lives, it really motivated them.”
However, she said that many language teachers did not use Facebook as a teaching tool because they were often concerned about invading their students’ private lives. But she said that in the end-of-course feedback there was not a single complaint about it and she recommended other language teachers try it.
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