LINE is an application on electronic devices such as cell phone, tablet, computer, for instant communication. LINE was developed by Japan and Korea in 2011. LINE is especially popular in Asian countries and has accumulated 220 millions users in the world till 2016 Q2 from Statisca report (https://www.statista.com/statistics/327292/number-of-monthly-active-line-app-users/). LINE was introduced to Taiwan in 2012 and it has been very popular across the fields in government, business, commercial, education, etc. All city governments and dependent governmental bureaus have used LINE to broadcast news about laws, regulations, drastic weather, suspensions due to unexpected incidents, events and so on. Commercial business such as clothing, make-up and restaurant have adopted it to promote their advertisements and cooperate with famous online models. There are also many traditional education modalities adopt this application to provide learners a variety of learning styles.

For example, “Let’s Talk in English, Studio Classroom”, the most well-known and long-lived English learning magazine in Taiwan since 1962 founded by an American Christian missionary, Doris Brougham. Every schools subscribed it during my schooling era in Taiwan; and now, there is no exception either. It was the monthly magazine on daily base with texts and audio CD-RAM or radio broadcasting every morning, and then evolved into TV program every morning to talk the magazine content of the corresponding date. Now, it has advanced to LINE application without time and place limitation. In addition, with the instant communication features, students can “line” messages to the official account of Let’s Talk in English, Studio Classroom to ask questions with instant answer responds, which didn’t exist on previous learning modalities.

There are many features on this application, such as free individual and group chats, voice and video calls, text, audio and video clip messages, exciting stickers, albums and notes, personal networks, etc. Moreover, LINE account is registered by cell phone number, which prevents multi-accounts possibilities like Facebook registered by emails. In other words, people are shown on real name and that reduces certain anonymous cyber-bullying happenings. There are also a lot of official accounts broadcasting latest information, which students can follow them to broaden their horizons.

LINE can be an active way to enhance language learning. LINE’s multilingual options with 40 different languages provide users a wide rage of choices. Furthermore, the translation feature that you can use in chat rooms, which offers users an instant translation function while receive messages or text messages. That is, even entry-level learners who only recognize basic words can use the translation feature to understand the information and keep the conversation going.

Since LINE serves such amazing features, teachers can utilize it to give students assignments. Teachers can post assignments as video or audio clips, images, texts or attachments in all kinds of file formats, and have students respond to teachers’ inputs on their own ideas. One of the most amazing thing here is LINE can show the message is read or not which teachers can monitor and remind students’ process. But, who don’t check their cell phone frequent nowadays especially for current adolescents…

However, one of the concerns is that if students did not have a cell phone number, they could not register the account. Therefore, the potential socio-economic differences among students’ background are another issue teacher should contemplate about to eliminate it. Learning should not be limited by who you are or where you come from. Schools and teachers might work together to apply some pre-paid plans for public accounts for these kids. Since these kids do not have opportunities in daily life with these technologies, teachers should increase their chances to experience them in learning on multiple intelligence development.