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Podcast: TEFL Training Institute Podcast
Episode:

What Should Be In a Language Learning App? (with Jake Whiddon)
Category: Education
Duration: 00:15:00
Publish Date: 2021-02-14 16:04:00
Description:

Jake Whiddon joins me to talk about what should go in a language learning app. Do language learning apps reflect educational theory? What are apps doing better than teachers? And what tricks are app designers missing?

Jake Whiddon’s teacher training webinars

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Ross Thorburn:  Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast" everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. In this week's episode, we're looking at "What should be in a language learning app?"

I think as apps are becoming more and more common, it's going to be more and more important that teachers can give students and parents informed advice about what app to choose to learn a language.

In this week's episode, we have Jake Whiddon sharing insights from his research, which he's recently conducted as part of his master's program at the Norwich Institute of Language Education into apps and app‑based language learning. Now, on with the episode.

Ross:  Jake, to begin with, what made you want to investigate apps for language learning?

Jake Whiddon:  I currently work for an app company.

Ross:  [laughs] That's a good reason.

Jake:  That was the main reason. I also was interested in it because 2020 saw the rise of not just online teaching but a massive rise in the number of students and children having to use apps to continue learning while the schools were close. That's probably the other main reason why I was so focused on it.

Ross:  I also get impressions not a huge amount of research already out there on what works in apps.

Jake:  Up until 2015, no. By 2015, there were 80,000 educational apps in the App Store with practically none of them have had researched done on them.

Ross:  Which is so interesting because I think in most countries, if you wanted to start a school, you probably need to go through a lot of government red tape to get that open. Interestingly, if you open an app and put it online, I guess no one really has to check that.

Jake:  No, you just click a checkbox that says, "This is an education lab."

Ross:  I presume another challenge with making an effective app is that maybe a lot of the time that people building the apps...I guess there's probably not many, many people who could do that, right?

You'd either be a teacher, and you might understand the learning, but you wouldn't know much about the tech. [laughs] If you've got the tech skills, you probably wouldn't necessarily know much about that educational theory.

Jake:  That's exactly right. There's a lot of app companies I've been looking at that are just people from the tech industry who've realized the education and edtech is going to be a big business. They have tried to do that, and they lack those things.

Interestingly, [laughs] you see a lot of apps developed by educational PhDs, but they're not user‑friendly. They don't have that engagement. They don't have that gamey feeling about them. They lack there as well.

You can imagine if you're a child, and you've been playing Minecraft all day, and then suddenly someone says, "Do use this app," and it's developed by an educator, they don't necessarily end up being as fun.

Ross:  You're already now getting into this. What are some of the things that should be in an educational or language learning's app?

Read the rest of the interview here
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