Youglish

The most prominent advantage of Youglish is that users can listen to how native speakers use the words or expressions in the real world. This function of providing authentic language to the learners is a great way to teach them the pronunciations, as well as the usage of specific words or expressions. I feel that the limitation of Youglish is that most of the videos are segments of lectures or interviews rather than daily conversations. The context is rather formal. Therefore, I will use Youglish with learners who have academic or business learning goals. Those students can actually learn more than just pronunciations and usage from those videos that will help them in their studies or works, the different ideas on one topic, the structure of the lecture, etc. I won’t recommend Youglish to learners whose goals are to make simple conversations in life. When using Youglish, users have to click on next to get a different video that used the word they looked up, this is making learning a little bit inconvenient. Learners attention may get distracted by the videos when they are just trying to learn the pronunciation and usage of a single word.

I will recommend my students use Youglish at home to improve their pronunciations and to gain more knowledge about vocabularies. I think I will ask them to move to the next video when the current line is finished. But for those who wish to learn more than language, I will recommend them to watch the videos.