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LibreLingo Teaching Approach and Philosophy

What is the overall teaching approach of LibreLingo?

LibreLingo focuses foremost on removing barriers from language learning. Since one of the main factors in language-learning success is the time you spent learning, the courses should be easily approachable with flexible lessons. If the course material doesn't require preparation and a set amount of time, then the user is hopefully encouraged to make learning a routine that they can do regularly, on their own schedule.

Specifically, LibreLingo uses spaced repetition, which is meant to continually give a student information before they might forget it, keeping words and phrases fresh. Ideally spaced repetition is implemented by the course content itself (i. e. relatively rare words are repeated at increasing intervals in the course content itself), but repetition for already completed skills is automatically already implemented in LibreLingo’s software with “stale skills” that must be practiced for them to become fresh again.

Looking at the big picture, the greater approach of LibreLingo is to fully embrace the advantages of a free, open source platform in building tooling that will encourage greater creativity and customization. For example, a course can be forked (copied) and adapted for different teaching goals, or even be used by a private teacher to create a customized course for a student.

What is the reasoning behind the set of challenges present, and the way they are designed?

LibreLingo has five types of challenges:

  • Cards challenges are multiple choice questions that create associations between words and images. Visual association is a powerful learning technique, especially for simple words, and the images add fun and vibrancy to the learning experience. The photos also provide clues to the student, making this one of the easier challenges.
  • Options challenges are multiple choice questions that allow students to become comfortable with phrases, rather than single words. Unlike the card challenges, there are no clues.
  • Short input challenges serve to teach the target language's native writing system by requiring the learner to spell a word. If the student does need a hint, the mini-dictionary is available for this challenge.
  • Listening challenges aim to train the student’s listening comprehension with audio of a word or phrase in the target language. In this challenge, the student is asked to transcribe the word or phrase. The student can re-play the audio as many times as desired, allowing for further listening repetition of the spoken language.
  • Chips challenges are generated from phrases and train the user to construct sentences on their own, given some “building blocks.” This is meant to reinforce the syntax of a language as well as expose the learner to more complex examples. The mini-dictionary is available for clues in this challenge type, but there are no hints about sentence structure.

In what order do challenges appear?

First, a random subset of words and phrases are selected. Challenges are generated from these words and phrases, and then those challenges are put in a randomized order. One exception to the randomness is that the challenges belonging to the same word/phrase are ordered based on difficulty. For example, you should never see a cards challenge for a certain word after seeing a short input challenge for that same word, since the latter is a more difficult challenge type.

How and why are challenges split into levels of a skill?

Challenges are split randomly into different levels so that you have smaller chunks of learning material for each skill, without requiring the course authors to create very small units manually. This also makes the general overview of a course more manageable as it reduces the overall number of skills needed in a course.

Challenges are split randomly for the following reasons:

  • There's often a partial overlap between each level of a skill, thus it offers some repetition even before completing the skill.
  • Randomness reduces fatigue by making the practice sessions less predictable. It also reduces boredom by increasing the chance of encountering new words even as you practice the same skill by partially practicing material from a previous level.
  • Random splits do not require any manual work from the course creator.

For more insights on the creation of LibreLingo, check out the article 'Why I Built LibreLingo' by creator Daniel Kantor.