One way to encourage people to book a conversation could be by personal invitation: Marianne still sends me invitations or reminders for French, although I have been extremely lazy lately. It s a nice gesture and reminds me that there are lessons to be booked, people to chat with.
The fun of writing and importing the corrected text, having the audio read by my tutors, was enough motivation for me last year. I am satisfied with the quality of corrections and especially the individual feedback I get from using a LingQ tutor.
Being able to gain points through writing is a real possibility, but not at all the main driver for me. I have been giving away points recently and hope that the recipients will use them for discussions or writing submissions - and get as much fun out of it as I used to do. I have been tutoring and writing for LingQ for over a year now and only wish that my autumn indifference will lift soon!
What tempts me to book a lesson or to submit writing? Generally, I need time and enthusiasm. At the moment I am short on both.
I use tutors at LingQ because I like them, because the reports integrate with my learning, and because I do not want to be always offering English for Russian or Czech or whatever. I recognize that there are free services out there. I think we can do things to make it easier for people to connect with tutors and appreciate the suggestions here.
For people who are frightened, there may be people like me - who speak a couple of languages; who understand enough of others to help people in their first session and who know ALL about being frightened - who might be prepared to offer the occasional free first session. It ought to be entirely voluntary, though.
For me, I just bit the bullet and scheduled a conversation, even though I was quite nervous, because I knew I needed to practice speaking. I did find out that I felt less pressure when I was speaking with a non-native speaker through Skype, so Sanne’s suggestion is a good one, I think.
I support Bortrun’s suggestion of a set of writing topics and lengths at each level for students to tick off. That would probably motivate me to write more in Russian!
It would also be possible for tutors to give hints on how to approach such a piece of writing, ie ideas it could contain, how to plan a draft, how to revise the draft.
Students who don’t like that kind of prescriptive approach could just ignore it and continue to write about whatever they feel like.
“Do any of you have ideas on how we could increase the number of learners who sign up for discussions and submit writing for correction? Many thanks in advance.”
I still think that reading other members’ writing activities (you know, “X has sent 140 words for correction”) was stimulating. I remember you said it was removed because of someone’s concerns about privacy and because you thought it was not useful. Still, no one has ever told me why that was not useful, but “X joined a conversation with Y” and “X sent a rose to Y” are. :-o
So, my suggestion would be to bring those activity messages back (I would even add “has sent 140 words to Y”).
I really like the “send invitation” function for speaking activities. I often join a discussion because someone has sent me an invitation and I feel honour-bound to accept
I need to be named and shamed into writing more Russian. I could do with a list of writing topics to work through, and all my study buddies informed of my progress or lack of it. Maybe they could then buy raspberries or wooden spoons to send to me to express their contempt for my lack of progress.
I paid my last points for correcting and miracle oh miracle I got back my writing with nearly no mistakes. I couldn t believe it. So I checked this text once more by myself and found mistakes overlooked or even not discovered by the tutor AND I assume that He/She/ve had enough time because I was waiting a rather long time for this correction. should I try it again…I don’t know yet.
The benefit of a system like LingQ is you have the freedom to choose another corrector if the one you used isn’t your style. There are lots of good correctors out there, so I would encourage you to try another corrector.
However, I would like to review the work of any tutor who for whatever reason did not satisfy a learner. Ebby, I presume this was a submission in English.
@Ebby - That is too bad that you are not happy. Most of our tutors do a good job so we don’t like to hear when corrections are not done well or when they take too long to be completed. All corrections should be returned within 48 hours. I recommend that if you haven’t received your correction within that period of time, you should go in to that writing and change your tutor. I would also recommend that you give the tutor a poor rating on your writing report so that others can know to use someone else. If your correction is truly not satisfactory, please send an email to support [at] lingq [dot] com telling us which tutor and the title of the writing sample so that we can look into it further.
