LiveMocha

I was introduced to LiveMocha.com in my French class, as an option for our assignment to do an hour a week of activities outside of class interacting with the language. One of our resources on campus is a conversation lab with French speaking international students who were employed by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures to talk with us students for a few hours a week. This was an amazing resource, as it gave us experience talking with native speakers and learning about their cultures while we practiced our French.

One semester, though, the department couldn't find very many students to be lab assistants, and so the hours we could go to language lab became very limited. So someone in my class found LiveMocha, an online language learning community that matches people up who have similar or complimentary language learning goals for video chat. Thus, I was matched up with several French speakers who wanted to practice their English, and we are able to help each other and chat in either language. In secondary schools, there is no language lab. This is a shame, because language lab has been amazing for learning to speak conversationally. I would love for my students to be able to do some sort of video chat like LiveMocha, although I would rather it were a website aimed more at high school aged students so they would be matched up with their peers.