Posted: 31 March 2020

Keep Your Students Talking During 'Lockdown' - MFL Resources

There are a number of excellent resources available online to help your students to continue to improve their language skills. Here are just a few of our favourites.

Quizlet

You’re probably already aware of the Quizlet website and app, with its free online flashcards, diagrams, study guides and practice tests. This is a fantastic tool for helping students to revise and memorise vocabulary, verb conjugations and grammar rules and is available for French, Spanish, German and Latin.

The Great Languages Challenge

The British Council have put together a variety of challenges and tasks for students to do to help improve their languages skills.

Examples include researching aspects of the language they’re studying, learning key phrases or songs in the target language and changing their phone settings to the target language for an hour.

They have a general version, as well as versions for specific languages including French, German, Spanish and Arabic.

Duolingo

Chances are, if your students aren’t already using Duolingo, you may well be using it yourself to learn another language.

This is a brilliant tool for learning and practising vocabulary by reading, writing, listening and speaking. Students can even converse with bots, to help build their conversational skills.

It’s available for all the languages learned in schools, as well as a variety of others, should you have any keen linguists that want to get started on learning another language!

Seneca

This free learning platform is actually available for a variety of subjects, so could be really useful for your students while they try to continue to learn at home.

The interesting thing about Seneca is that it uses a very clever algorithm, so when you get an answer wrong, it shows you the information again but in a different format, to help you learn as fast as possible.

Available for French, German and Spanish, there’s even exam-board specific content. And they’ve peppered the site with some brilliant memes, to help students feel relaxed while they learn.

Conjuguemos

Conjuguemos focuses on grammar and is completely free for students, who are able to track their progress.

Learning tools include flashcards, games and graded practice. The games in particular are a great way to learn verbs and can be played as single player or competitive multiplayer games.

YouTube

YouTube offers a wealth of language learning content. There are a number of excellent channels dedicated to language learning.

Learn German with Anja is a channel that mixes more traditional German lessons with videos on the culture and life in Germany. There are a couple of interesting videos on there on the current situation in Germany and how it compares to that in Italy.

Easy German is another great channel for German. Many of the videos focus on a specific question or topic, with the hosts asking people on the street their opinions. All the videos are subtitled in English, so it’s a great opportunity to hear German as it’s spoken on an everyday basis.

Comme Une Française TV is a good choice for French – Géraldine posts regular bitesized lessons on French language and culture. Learn French with Alexa is also a great channel, with some very easy to follow lessons on key grammar points.

For Spanish, Señor Jordan is an American Spanish teacher who offers some fun lessons, including some excellent (and often hilarious songs). And Lightspeed Spanish offers immersive videos of everyday life in Spanish, as well as lower level lessons.

Netflix Language Learning

Netflix often has a great range of foreign language films on there. And there is now a new Google Chrome extension that can enhance the language learning aspect of watching these films. It allows students to have subtitles in both English and the target language. There’s also a ‘pro’ mode, where you can save words and sentences into your favourites.

We hope this is useful. Please don’t forget, we’ve also created a range of MFL resources that are all completely FREE and can be shared with your students.

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