How can Wooclap help you teach new languages?

Hi! 👋 I’m Jennifer, Wooclap’s Community Builder, and today I want to share with you the power of Wooclap as a language immersion tool. In this week’s edition of Jen’s Journal, you’ll learn how to: 

• Upload clips of your voice to Wooclap to quiz your student’s listening comprehension
• Create fill-in-the-blanks questions to test students’ memory on auxiliary verbs
• Get answers from ALL of your students using Wooclap quickly and easily

When I was learning French in high school in Connecticut, USA, my incredible French teacher Meryl Rockefeller taught us how to conjugate the verb “avoir” (to have) by singing it to the tune of “Tea for two", a song written in 1924 by Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar and made famous in 1950 by the film by the same name, starring Doris Day: 

J’ai, Tu as

Il a, Elle a

Nous avons, Vous avez

Ils ont, Elles ont

Things have changed a lot since then, and teachers now have a number of technological tools at their disposal to enhance their teaching. As a passionate learner of languages, I was excited to explore the ways in which Wooclap could be used in a language classroom. 

I recently spoke to Wooclap Super User Guy Delcominette, a French high school teacher in the United States. Just like Wooclap, Guy is originally from Belgium, but he’s been living in Louisiana for over 20 years.

Guy loves using technology in the classroom, and he’s been an avid user of Wooclap since he discovered it during the pandemic. What does he love the most about using Wooclap? “No one is embarrassed to answer,” says Guy, insisting that it takes just as long to ask the entire class a question with Wooclap as it would to ask one person if he asked aloud. 

Guy uses Wooclap to test his students' listening comprehension with recordings of his own voice. “I can use the same recordings from one year to the next,” says Guy, and while the initial setup of his Wooclap events required a bit of a time commitment, he finds that it has paid off over the years. His students love the interactivity that they get from Wooclap, and the ease of re-using the events has been a great help in terms of lesson planning. “Right now we’re studying the passé composé, and I use Wooclap to quiz them on the auxiliary verbs,” says Guy. 

Wooclap’s versatility and interactive features provide a unique way to immerse students in a new language. Whether you're enhancing listening comprehension with your own voice recordings or creating a fully immersive virtual environment by switching the interface language, Wooclap can transform your teaching experience.

Just like Guy Delcominette, you can find joy in seeing your students engage more deeply with the language. It’s all about making the learning process fun, interactive, and effective. 

Want to try this out yourself? 

To create a listening comprehension activity with your own voice, first record yourself speaking (for example, with a voice recording app, or QuickTime player on a Mac). Be sure the audio file is either an mp3 or m4a file, and that it is less than 200MB. When you’re ready, create a new Wooclap event and select the ‘Audio/Video’ question type. You can then upload the audio file, and create a comprehension question afterwards (for example, Multiple Choice or Fill in the Blanks). 

To test your students' verb conjugation with Wooclap, try a Fill in the Blanks question, with the auxiliary verb as the blank! 

Or, use the Wooclap template below to test out these last two features!