WEEK 2: Voki!! A Game-like tool for language teaching

Hello, young language learners' teachers!

Welcome to my Avatar! 🥰 (👈CLICK) 

Screenshot from Voki website

This week I'd like to introduce one of the most useful game-like tools when teaching young learners: Voki. This is a character making website that enables students to make their own Voki speak for them in a foreign language. 

The first character I've chosen

To create a new character is very easy, we only need to follow the instructions provided on the website like the description on the left picture. 

• First, select an Avatar.
• Second, customize the selected avatar.
• Third, add a background.
• Fourth, add a voice.
• Finally, you can save and share your creation.

💛 Linking Voki with language teaching: 

Through creating an Avatar by using Voki,  students language skills could be practiced:

• Writing skill.
• Learn to pronounce the sentences they wrote by imitating different kinds of accents Voki has provided.

💛 Linking Voki with motivation: 

As motivation has been an essential research topic in the second language acquisition field for a long time, a good language teacher should understand students' motivation and try to enhance that motivation. 

Nowadays, for multiple reasons, most of the Chinese students started to get English education from the Kindergarten stage at about 5 years old. If young learners could be taught to use this fancy way to learn English, their intrinsic motivation might be stimulated. 

💛 Advantages:

• First, the website of Voki is very concise and students could learn to use it immediately after a brief introduction. 
• Second, it could help your learners to be more motivated through the language learning process and it is especially suitable for young learners who could be motivated by a DIY cute cartoon Avatar. 

💛 Limitations: 

However, I have also discovered some limitations like students might be attracted by setting the figure rather than practicing language pronunciation. I mean, for students, the fancy images of Voki might attract too much attention to designing their own character, rather than focus on learning the language. Thus, I  recommend teachers to use Voki by themselves and then to use well-designed Voki video to motivate students. 

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💛Postscript 

As deeply interested in using Voki to teach young learners, in this semester, I got a chance to develop action research on how to motivate young learners by using ICT. At first, I used traditional ways like read after the teacher, gap-filling tasks to teach young learners aged 9 to 11 the key vocabulary from a simplified version of Shakespeare's play -- Macbeth, but some of the students said they are near to fall asleep. I know the reason why they were nearly fell asleep is partly because of the class time arrangement, however from my perspective, if the lesson is interesting enough, students could have a better learning outcome. Luckily, I found there is an image of William Shakespeare from Voki.  

 Before learning (👈 Click to watch)

Screenshot from my self-made voki 

After learning the key vocabulary: (👈 Click to watch)

Screenshot from my self-made voki 

This interesting video had motivated the learners a lot. Definitely, this helped me a lot during teaching. 😄😄😄







Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, please leave a comment~ I will reply as quickly as possible.  💛💙💚💜