About
💡 Why FluOLinGo is built this way
FluOLinGo was designed by your instructor around five commitments from the learning sciences. None of them are decoration — each one shapes what you see (and don’t see) on every page.
🧪 Test first, teach second[1] [2] [3]
Every goal starts with a Pre-Test you take before the topic is taught. Trying — and often failing — first prepares the mind for the lesson: the classroom explanation lands on questions you already own, not on a blank page. Commercial apps can’t do this, because there is no Thursday class coming after them.
📝 Errors are the curriculum[4]
Nothing here is graded. A wrong answer triggers a WHY explanation and lands on your 📝 Bring to class list — your personal agenda for the next lesson. Your mistakes aren’t the cost of learning; they’re the raw material, and they travel with you into the classroom.
🎲 Doing beats reading[5]
Reading about French is the weakest way to learn it, so reading is rationed (the Memo is one card, never a chapter) and everything else makes you produce: pick, type, build the whole sentence, speak it, compose a dialogue where the waiter actually reacts to what you order. The activity ladder climbs from recognising to constructing to interacting.
🎤 Fair to the mouth, strict to the hand[6]
When you speak, FluOLinGo accepts what sounds right — il s’appelle and ils s’appellent are the same in the mouth, and you’re told so. When you type, the letters must be right, because spelling is what typing trains. Each modality is graded on what it actually teaches — difficulty is kept where it helps and removed where it only frustrates.
🏫 A companion, not a replacement[7]
The 50 goals here are your course’s can-do objectives — not an app company’s syllabus. FluOLinGo prepares you before each class and consolidates after it, with reviews spaced over time (🔖 DéjàRevu). Commercial apps teach their own curriculum to nobody in particular; this one exists to make your next lesson work better. That’s a different job — and it’s the job that matters here.
The name
The middle word is the one doing the work. Commercial apps promise fluency in French — unbounded, unmeasurable, always one more subscription away. This one promises fluency on fifty named goals: finite, checkable, and finishable. A name that is only a noun phrase hides its verb, and this one hides four — each standing on the one above it.
Fluency built on your course’s goals
The fifty goals are LAF1201’s own can-do objectives, not an app company’s syllabus. You can only build on ground someone owns.
Fluency trained on linguistic goals
Every drill targets a language competence — never a streak, a daily target or a points total. You can only train a competence.
Fluency earned on one of fifty goals
The pre-test, the practice and the revision all happen inside a single objective at a time. You can only earn what is countable — and countable means finishable.
Fluency measured on named goals
Each goal carries a can-do statement and the competence its pre- and post-activities assess. You can only measure what is specified.
Take a rung away and the ones above it lose their footing: fluency measured on goals nobody built on is an audit with no building under it, and fluency earned on goals never trained is a badge. All four verbs take the same preposition — build on, train on, earn on, measure on — so the name keeps that one word and lets you read whichever rung you are standing on.
References
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379–424.
- Richland, L. E., Kornell, N., & Kao, L. S. (2009). The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 243–257.
- Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489.
- Chi, M. T. H., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 49(4), 219–243.
- Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher et al. (Eds.), Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.