Student Survey

I conducted a student survey with the students I teach. There were 59 replies with about 75%  of those indicating that they had used Duolingo.

This question confirmed some things that I already expected. The students generally like the game element of Duolingo (20% like levelling up, and 8% like earning points). It also confirmed to me, what I had been seeing online that they don't really 'friend' each other and therefore they don't care about comparing their progress with their friends. I was surprised by the second most popular answer: "working at my own speed" and the third most popular answer: "practising all four skill areas", which show that the students have a certain maturity of thought towards their language study, which I perhaps didn't give them credit for.

As with the first question, the results were quite evenly spread, with 20% of the students wanting the option to learn lists of vocabulary,  (one of the strengths of Duolingo in my opinion is forcing the learner to produce language in sentences rather than on the single word level) and 19% thinking that the main defect of Duolingo is the lack of languages to learn. For students in Hong Kong, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are notably absent, despite a wide range of European languages. 

This question revealed that a minority of students worked on Duolingo at home, and despite the portability of this learning method (well-made apps for mobile phones and tablets) hardly any worked on this during their travel to and from home. Most of the students worked on Duolingo when given time in class to use it.

The majority of students said they would use Duolingo more if there was lesson time dedicated to this. A significant proportion also wished they had more free time at home to be able to use it. As Emma and Gemma indicated, some students don't use it, just because they aren't motivated by the goal of learning a foreign language (10% - 'If I was more interested in learning foreign languages').