As Dr. Mary Kalantzis says in the video on Differentiated Learning, Part 7A:

“Working within digital spaces does allow us to harness the attention of every learner, to tailor make the learning to their needs, to track whether they are performing or not performing and to adjust what we are doing. It provides us with the affordances for ensuring that all learners can be engaged.”

Differentiated teaching in a foreign language classroom has been the focus of many teachers for a very long time. Even in a classroom of total beginners, i.e. learners who have no prior knowledge of the language being taught, there is always a wide spectrum of abilities and profiles right from the very start: some are risk takers and will speak spontaneously, some a risk averse and will clam up, some need a period of latency before uttering a single word, some perceive the sounds of the foreign language better than others, etc. The list is endless.

When it comes to fluency in the foreign language, and to paraphrase the well-known quote according to which one does not learn a language, but merely get used to it, technology mediated by computers can not only help learners practice the language outside the classroom, referred to as ubiquitous learning, as it is done traditionally but can also help them practice it in a differentiated fashion, among themselves.

Indeed, fluency, whether in speaking or in writing, which is to be practiced and not learnt, is best achieved when learners practice according to their abilities or when learners with the same abilities practice together. Depending on the topics and other factors, such as the skills to be practiced (reading, writing, speaking or listening) learners are paired or grouped to work on various sets of activities.

New technology mediated by computers, such as popular social media like Facebook or Twitter, can enable learners to practice and collaborate on these sets of activities more easily and interactively.

Here is an example of two learners, who had missed classes due to other commitments in the provinces in Cambodia, being asked to describe their day in order to keep on practicing their English.

Here is another example of a learner, who had to miss class because of work commitment, having photographed a part of his supplementary homework in order to ask a question related to the instructions that he had not understood.

Here is a third example of learners practicing writing sentences about their plans for Pchum Ban (or Ancestor Day here in Cambodia) according to their abilities.

As we can see, even a popular social medium like Facebook, can be easily used to differentiate learning and enable learners to practice the language according to their abilities at the time, but also their motivation and available times.

REFERENCE:

Differentiating Instruction for EFL Learners, Laura A. Borja, Sandy T. Soto, Tatiana X. Sanchez, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_8_1_August_2015/5.pdf