Learning a new language is on the bucket list of many people. If you’re one of them, then you’ll be happy to know that technology can help you to learn easily and quickly. You no longer need to leave the comfort of your home, let alone your city or country, to learn a new language. Instead, you can learn the language of your choice without even having to step out of your bed. That is how easy learning a new language is today, all thanks to the internet and advancements in learning technology.

In the past few years, technology-integrated classroom systems have become increasingly popular. A major reason for this is the growing trend of online language learning. Today, we have learning management systems and virtual classrooms focused on language learning that look to facilitate the teaching of the instructor, provide a comprehensive and well-structured learning experience, and strengthen learner engagement.

It goes without saying that language instruction institutes need to start transitioning to more tech-savvy ways of language teaching. This will not only help to make their teaching more effective, but it will also ensure that they don’t fall behind their competition in the race to become the premier language learning source or institution. In other words, technology has a critical role to play in the present and future of language learning. Following are some ways technology is helping language instructors to revolutionize language learning.

1.     Remote Access to Language Learning

The biggest benefit of technology is the ability to reach audiences across the globe. When it comes to language learning, this means that people can learn a preferred language from native speakers even if they are miles away from the latter.

Technology has opened doors for virtually everyone who is interested in learning a new language by allowing easy access to the resources needed.  Language teaching and learning is no longer restricted by geographical boundaries or distances. Instead, it is at your fingertips whenever and wherever you may need it.

2.     Digitization of Learning Resources

The digitization of language learning resources is one of the best things to have occurred in the language learning field in the past decade or so. People no longer have to carry bulky books with them on the train or bus to learn the language of their choice. Instead, they can learn from a digitized version of the same resource on their phones on tablets.

One of the earliest innovations in the digitized or virtual language learning world were web dictionaries and hyperlinked text that made it easy as hell to cross-reference words. The next innovation in the field was the digitization of entire dictionaries to allow people to learn easily on-the-go.

Today, these dictionaries and other language learning resources can be easily stored on smartphone without using up too much of your phone’s memory space. Additionally, there are language services that provide translation that is collected from and reviewed by bilingual users. Also, while they may be far from perfect, translation tools such as Google Translate and Linguee.com have helped many people across the globe to learn a foreign language.

3.     Blended Language Courses

These courses look to increase student engagement by combining online and in-class language learning. This allows online language training and classroom teaching to complement each other. As a result, the instructor transitions from a teacher to a facilitator.

After learning from comprehensive and structured eLearning modules, students head to the classroom where the teacher can focus on the weak points of the class instead of having to recite the rules of language learning to the students. This saves time and makes the job of the language instructor much easier. Not only does technology make blended language learning a reality, but it also helps promote a methodology for language learning that is both intuitive and proven to be successful for language development.

4.     The Rise of Auto-Correction

The rise of autocorrection was another major breakthrough in the field of innovative language learning. Auto-correction has made it easier to learn languages whether it is pronunciation analyzers or simple text-autocorrect. The popularity of auto-correction can be gauged by the fact that today you will find spellcheckers absolutely everywhere.

Often free to use, the auto-correction tools or spellcheckers will check your spelling and grammar to ensure what you’re writing in a particular language is correct. Although spellcheckers are far from perfect, some advanced auto-correction tools, such as Grammarly, will help you with correct not just the words, but also the style, to help you streamline what you write.

Additionally, there are tool such as Wordbook that help to improve your pronunciation in some languages, such as Chinese. The tool will allow you to know how close, or far, you are from a native speaker. Similar functions are offered by other resources as well which includes Google Translate.

5.     Interactive Language Learning

Research has proven that learning a new language through input is ineffective and not best for achieving learner language development. Therefore, the focus of language instructors should be on an interactive learning that is enabled by technology-based tools and resources.

Instead of simply learning about a language from an instructor, students must be able to ‘do’ things with the language being taught. Fortunately, technology makes this easy by allowing students to interact with language courses to gain a complete understanding of a language’s components. In a intuitive and interactive learning model, students are likely to feel more comfortable and less embarrassed to make mistakes and learn from them. This can only be a good thing.

These are just 5 of the several ways technology is helping to revolutionize language learning. To know about the other ways that technology is changing language learning, keep following us.

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