Building virtual learning communities : a qualitative study of an online community of practice on the language-learning website Duolingo

Abstract

The use of online language-learning tools for independent learning has been growing in the past years thanks to free websites and applications like Duolingo. The overall objective of this thesis is to demonstrate how the users of Duolingo constitute a growing community of practice. Through a qualitative study, this thesis explores the content of Duolingo’s main discussion section to locate typical activities that communities do to develop their practice. For the purpose of this study, a survey was also conducted among Duolingo users to determine if these activities were reflected in their answers about their own experience among the community.