Has anyone used iNaturalist in teaching English (as a second or a foreign language)?
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@joemdo has! He might be quite busy this week with organizing Miami for the City Nature Challenge but hopefully he can share what he does as a high school Portuguese and Italian teacher.
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Not being an educator, I can see a couple of uses for iNat. In my part of the world (Canada) people comment on posts in English or French. Not being fluent in French, I’m picking up a couple of the ‘shorthands’ French Naturalists use. ‘I think.’ (or Je pense) is not really a complete sentence, but is commonly used. The correct phrase, in formal English would be ‘I do not know what this is, but I think it might be…’. This may be a more advanced ‘skill’ to master, but it might be useful for ESL students to at least have a sense of how English can be shortened.
Secondly, the Latin basis of the binomial naming might be used as a clue to Latin roots of some of the English language. ‘Lepidoptera’ contains the root ‘ptera’ (wing). It is also used in words likes ‘helicopter’ - helical wing. Again, these topics may be too advanced for what you are looking for, but I’m just throwing some stuff out!
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I’m surprised this post got so little traction.
One very straightforward use would be to expand one’s foreign-language vocabulary by selecting two lexicons – one’s first language, and the language being learned. This may be less useful if it is a language that uses a different script (for instance, a class in conversational Chinese seldom uses Chinese characters), but as long as the second-language names are in an understandable script, seeing the more common taxa repeatedly can reinforce learning their names.
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Ive set my iNat account to show names in Kalanga, a language I’m struggling to learn. It’s so useful as a language learning tool. I think the Kalanga names go into my brain subconsciously as they appear on my screen so often.
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I am learning German, so I decided to switch the language on iNaturalist to German. Now I know 4 names for many species (Russian, English, German, and scientific) or even 5 (I know some Kazakh names too). I also often ID observations from Germany and Austria, and make comments and enter discussions in German to practice natural conversations. In my opinion, iNaturalist is a fantastic tool for learning languages :)
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