Duolingo: experiência como tarefa de casa na aprendizagem de vocabulário em língua inglesa

Abstract

This article reports a research on the use of the Duolingo application as a complementary didactic resource of English language teaching to help vocabulary memorization. According to Gass and Sellinker (2001) the lexicon may be the most important component of the language, with vocabulary errors being more stringent and also the most common among learners of a second language. The aim of the research is to verify if students, using Duolingo daily, demonstrate greater ease of learning and remember vocabulary. This research is characterized as a case study with a qualitative approach. The public audience were 8th and 9th grade students from a Municipal Elementary School from São Martinho / RS. There was a participation of 13 students, these 2 gave up. The use of Duolingo was approximately 6 months totaling 28 hours, performed as a homework assignment. Data collection occurred through annotations, record of participants' comments in class breaks, individual WhatsApp reports and questionnaires, which served as the basis for data analysis. Although it is not a solution for the learning of a foreign language, because it does not present situations of use of the language in real context or close to the real, it helps to memorize words, enriching students' vocabulary.