Language Learning Applications

In order to investigate EFL teachers’ individually-guided professional development activities in Turkey and identify any needs for new professional development programs, Dr. Cagri Ozkose-Biyik from Yasar University and Dr. Oner Uslu from Ege University have developed a questionnaire. Then, they collected data from 820 EFL teachers across Turkey as well conducting 28 individual interviews. The mobile applications shared with you here are the applications that the EFL teachers mentioned in these questionnaires and interviews.
For your convenience, Behice Ceyda Cengiz and Nur Gedik Bal, PhD students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara reviewed the mobile applications that 848 teachers in the abovementioned study shared. Enjoy!

Duolingo Duolingo is a mobile application that language learners can benefit a lot. Learners can have an account and choose the language they want to study and they can also choose how much time they can study daily. The activities include short sentence translations from the target language to the mother tongue and vice versa. Moreover, learners can hear the pronunciation of the whole sentence during the practice. The application is easy to use, so the students will not have problems downloading or using it. Students can also trace their development in language learning through Duolingo as they can start from the low level and continue to the next levels.
Ted –Ted Talk Ted –Ted Talks
The mobile application provides many videos on a variety of topics such as science, education, art and psychology. A language teacher can make use of the videos in language classes as a warm up activity to any topic as there is search button and the teacher can easily find a video on the current topic of the lesson. The videos can be entertaining or inspiring and students can make use of the subtitles if they have difficulty in following. The subtitles are provided in more than 100 languages. Therefore, low level students might start with the subtitles in their mother tongue and go on with English subtitles and end with no subtitles in the long run. When language learners download this application, they will hear about the newly added videos, so they can follow the current
The Homework App The Homework App is designed for both iPhone and iPad and it might be very useful for language learners as they can schedule their courses, take notes for each lesson and write the due dates of their homework and related explanations regarding their assignments. Moreover, they can also set reminders for their assignments. They can also take a photo and attach it to their tasks. They can also see their duties on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. It is a free application. Therefore, students can download and use it for free from iTunes.