In this week's post, we decided to work with a tool that brings the opportunity to improve the class’ listening skills.
This website is called Lyricstrainin, an application that has exclusively subtitled videos, so students can listen to songs and read the subtitles, but something that makes this site stand out from others is the playful activities that accompany each of these videos. When working with this app the student must choose between different videos available and complete the missing words, which vary depending on the difficulty chosen. In case of not answering in time, the music will stop temporarily and the student will be able to listen to that verse again until they can write the correct word, but the real fun is to try to be as fast and efficient as possible to listen to the song without being interrupted.
In our opinion, we find that this application can greatly help the learning of an L2 mainly because of its interactive-playful character which is directly linked to the concept of gamification, a concept that supports learning in safe environments and attractive settings such as games. It should be noted that there are different theories such as Nicholson, 2012 which states:
The concept of meaningful gamification is that the primary use of game layers is not to provide external rewards, but rather to help participants find a deeper connection to the underlying topic. This is done through game elements that focus on concepts of play, that provide information and choice, and that encourage reflection. (p.1)
Considering what was said in the previous quote. We could say that the ultimate goal of gamification is to generate a connection between the information and the subject effectively through the use of positive stimulation that comes mainly from the environment and the feeling of accomplishment that the completion of those tasks generates.
Regarding participation, this tool can be used by all people regardless of their level of English, this is because it makes use of universal interests as in this case the music so the only thing that would vary would be the musical genres.
Continuing with the possible problems we could talk about many topics such as infrastructure or equipment, but we believe that it is worth emphasizing this because being an application that requires a stable internet connection in case of having an unstable connection could make it unusable in class.
Another of the main points that could affect this would be the lack of vocabulary from students or the lack of knowledge of certain grammatical rules which could complicate the students’ learning, Another thing to take into consideration is that in many cases, students do not apply the knowledge learned exclusively because they know by heart the lyrics of the songs without any context or meaning, as is commonly given in the audio-linguistic approach where they can learn to pronounce things but do not know their true meaning, which could present false results because students will be able to complete the activity but when it comes to demonstrating their knowledge, these would be insufficient or null.
References
Preprint of Nicholson, S. (2013, June). Exploring Gamification Techniques for Classroom Management. Paper Presented at Games Learning Society 9.0, Madison, WI. Available online at http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/gamificationtechniquesclassroom.pdf