As we mentioned previously, things have been really busy here at Radio Lingua over the past few weeks and there have been a number of things we’ve been meaning to do. We’re now back on track with Coffee Break French – lesson 78 was published yesterday and the remaining two lessons in the series will be published over the next two weeks.
Our discussion forum recently suffered a major spam attack and we’ve had to filter through all the discussion threads and clean up the spam. We’re pleased to announce that the forum is available again and we would invite our community to join the discussions on the forum. We’re also looking for some users who would be willing to be moderators in an attempt to control any future spam attacks. If you would like to take on this role, please contact us and let us know. It would be useful to know your username in our system in case it’s not clear from your email address. Your duties would simply involve keeping an eye open for any spam on the forum and helping to clean up the forum when it’s required. We look forward to hearing from you!
Learning a language on your own can be a challenge. We hope that our podcasts and other materials help you to learn where and when suits you best. The Radio Lingua community is made up of hundreds of thousands of learners all across the world, and we’d like to engage the community further and get more of you talking about your language learning.
The old version of our site featured a discussion forum which was popular among users, but was unfortunately plagued with spam and this caused some major headaches for our very small team. The discussion forum also predated our new membership system, which meant that users had to have different accounts in the discussion forum and in the members’ system.
When we launched the new Radio Lingua website in May we did not include links to the former discussion forum, as we had hoped that the discussions would move to the main website and that discussions would take place around the blog posts related to the episodes of our podcasts. However, this does not seem to be working particularly well and we’d like your help in trying to move forward with a discussion forum which will be active, useful to learners, and not too ‘cliquey’.
We do have strong presences on Facebook with our Coffee Break Spanish and Coffee Break French pages, and we use Twitter regularly to interact with our community, but we feel that the discussions about Radio Lingua materials should ideally be taking place here on our site.
While we’re not aiming to be the new WordReference or anything like that (as they do such a great job already and have a huge userbase) we would like to provide a place where you can share your learning, help each other with the language(s) you’re learning, and find answers to any questions you may have about using our materials.
So, what do you think?
- Is it enough to use the blogging and podcast system here on the site to develop conversations, inviting listeners to comment on our posts?
- Should we develop a discussion forum for members’ only?
- Should there be a fee involved in the members’ only forum which would in turn help us to ’staff’ the forum properly with native speakers, teachers, etc?
- Are there other ways to manage and police the discussion forum to avoid the spam problems we’ve experienced in the past?
- Should we rely on the discussions happening on Facebook and Twitter for interaction?
- Do you have any experiences of other discussion forums or systems?
We’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this. Please post a comment on this discussion (rather than discussing it elsewhere!) and we’ll try to move forward with whatever works best for the community.
Did you know that Radio Lingua is also on Twitter? We tweet our latest updates at twitter.com/radiolingua. Join the conversation by signing up for a free Twitter account at twitter.com and then “follow” @radiolingua. You can then let us know what you’re learning by posting your own updates in 140 characters or less.
We have lots more plans for using Twitter this summer and we’ll keep you up to date as we introduce these ideas and projects. If you have suggestions, post them in the comments!
This weekend we’re heading out to France to film a pilot of a new series which will be aimed particularly at language-learners in schools. Having spoken to lots of language teachers one of the most common requests is for content which focuses on “sample answers” for speaking and writing assessments. What we’ve decided to do is try interviewing people in the streets and asking lots of people the same question(s), in an attempt to get lots of developed answers to the types of questions which you may well be asking your own students in their speaking assessments.
We’re not 100% sure of how the final product will look, but we’re hoping that we’ll be able to develop a series of short videos which will feature lots of people talking about the same topic which will be easy to watch and include in your lesson plans. They’ll be well-produced and available in formats perfect for the classroom and viewing on interactive whiteboards, etc.
We need your help!
Obviously as teachers we have our own ideas of the questions we’d like to ask, but our experience tends to be from Scottish classrooms. We’d like your input on the type of questions you would like us to ask our interviewees – the type of questions you ask your own students in class and in assessments. We’d like to stick to the level of questions that are easy for passers-by to answer – nothing too complicated or deep, and concentrating more on topics such as family, travel, education and work, likes and dislikes, dreams and aspirations, etc., rather than more complex topics such as the environment, immigration, etc. Equally, we hope we’ll get developed answers so want to make the questions as open-ended as possible.
We’ve already had some input (thank you!) from teachers who were involved in the MFL Flashmeeting last Monday, but we’d like more! The suggested questions are listed below:
- Where would you like to live if you didn’t live here and why?
- What was the first thing you did this morning?
- How do you normally spend your weekend?
- If you were an animal, which animal would you be and why?
- Where do you normally go on holiday and why?
- What is the typical food of this area?
- What sports do you play?
Remember, we’re trying to get questions which will be useful to you in preparing your own students to talk about their lives, experiences, etc.
We head out first thing on Saturday morning, so post your ideas in the comments as soon as possible! Many thanks in advance. By the way, if this works we’ll be doing the same in German and Spanish soon!
Thanks in advance!
We’re delighted to announce our new website which has been many months in the planning. Since we launched Coffee Break Spanish back in 2006 we’ve launched a new website for each show, and at times things have been difficult for visitors to know where to find things. We felt we wanted to bring everything into the one place so that our listeners would be able to access the content more easily, find out how to use our materials, interact with us and provide feedback, and improve their language skills.
We hope that you enjoy discovering the new website and that you find it easy to navigate and pleasant to use. Everything is organised by languge, so you’ll always be able to find your way to the Languages. If you’ve arrived at the website from one of our product urls, eg. www.coffeebreakspanish.com, then you’ll be taken straight to the product page for Coffee Break Spanish. That page provides information about the show, the hosts and the structure of the series, and you get direct access to the free audio materials from that page. The Languages menu provides a drop-down link to each language and the podcasts available for that language. For members there is a page for each Season Pass, so if you’ve purchased a Season Pass for Coffee Break French Level 1, then you can access that page through the Members’ link. You can also log in to your Control Panel directly from the sidebar on most pages, so you will have a handy list with links to your Season Passes available at all times.
You can find out more about Radio Lingua, our methods, the story of the company and about our presenters in the About section, and you can access our help materials in the Support Section.
Needless to say, over the next few days there are bound to be teething problems, and there are a few parts of the membership system which will be remain in the old style of the site until we migrate everything to the new site. We’d ask you to bear with us as we put the final touches to our new site.
So, what do you think? What are your first impressions? Hopefully you find the site easy to use, clean, and efficient. If you have experienced any problems, please go easy on us! It’s only to be expected that one or two things don’t work quite as expected. Let us know if you spot any typos, bugs or if something doesn’t work on your system. Post your comment here (if necessary, click on the comments link at the top of the post).
