Innovation in Language Learning

The training of teachers of national languages and cultures is a new fact in Cameroon. This began on 2009 and it is still looking for best ways for the training of young adults. In fact, the future teachers who are trained are young and most of them use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Viber and Whatsapp. Although each student learns the local language of his / her community, we notice much failure at the end of the semester. We realize that rare are those who speak their local language at home. So, the programme of training seems intense for them. They need more than the four hours they have per week in the time table to learn this language. We looked for a solution, and we taught that the use of a social media could be beneficial. We thus create a Whatsapp group since Whatsapp is very used by Cameroonian youth. We planned activities and meeting hours. Many students were happy to experience such learning procedure. However, the procedure faced some obstacles. The greatest obstacle concerns the monitoring. First of all, some students are not on line at time, or are absent. Secondly, the management of the speaking of all participants were not easy. Thirdly, the evaluation of the exercises given. This last difficulty results from the fact that the writing system of Cameroonian languages contains some signs which cannot be typed in a phone. More reflexion must be undertaken to improve the use of Whatsapp as a possible solution for well teaching of Cameroonian languages.