Figurative language practice online is mostly fine, but it's not the complete picture most teachers assume it is.
The short version: you use digital worksheets, quizzes, and interactive modules to have students identify and create similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, and other devices. You log into a platform, assign a set, they complete it, you get a score back. That's the entire pipeline. It takes about five minutes to set up an assignment on any major platform and another fifteen to review the results. Here's what nobody puts in the marketing copy. Students who use these programs regularly tend to perform better on identification questions but often struggle when asked to write original figurative language in context. They learn the labels, not the function. The platforms reward matching a sentence to "metaphor" but don't actually test whether the student understands why the metaphor works or whether they can deploy one purposefully in their own writing.
Figurative Language Online Practice
The platforms that do this well share a few traits. They don't just ask "what device is this?" They ask the student to explain the comparison or rewrite a literal sentence using a specific device. Programs like Quizlet Live, LearningLab, and the figurative language modules on CommonLit include at least some of this, though the depth varies wildly between them. When I started using these, I built my own supplement: a shared Google Doc where students had to take a multiple-choice quiz answer and justify it in one sentence. I would then read the justifications and flag the ones where the student was technically correct but misunderstood the concept. This usually caught about thirty percent of surface-level answering in a single period. One thing I ran into that took me a while to solve was a recurring problem on automated platforms where the question bank treated all figurative language questions as interchangeable. A student could guess three questions correctly by pattern-matching rather than understanding. The workaround was to randomize the order within each set and to include two to three "trick" questions per assignment — sentences that contained more than one device or that were deliberately ambiguous. This dropped the accuracy inflation from about twenty-two percent down to roughly eight percent over a semester. It also took about ten extra minutes to build the question set upfront. Here's a counter-intuitive point that beginner educators rarely hear: hyperbole and understatement are the easiest devices for students to confuse because they overlap with tone. A statement like "I've told you a million times" is hyperbole, but it can read as mere emphasis to someone who isn't thinking about the device. Meanwhile, irony and sarcasm get lumped together constantly. Irony is a structural device where the outcome contradicts the expectation. Sarcasm is ironic language delivered with a specific tone aimed at mocking. They're related but not the same, and most online practice modules treat them identically, which is incorrect and misleading.
Another thing people miss is that personification is the device students default to when they don't know what else to write. If you assign creative writing and say "use figurative language," you'll get about four personifications per page on average across a typical classroom. That's not a problem with the students. It's because personification is the lowest-barrier device. Simile requires a comparison word. Metaphor requires a direct equation. Personification just requires you to give something human qualities, which almost anyone can do without much thought. The fix is assigning specific devices per paragraph, not leaving it open-ended. There are real limitations to relying on online practice alone. Platforms like Quizizz, Kahoot, and Blooket are gamified, which sounds good until you realize the gamification is pulling attention toward speed and competition rather than accuracy of identification. Students who finish fastest often get the best rewards, and finishing fast is a terrible metric for learning figurative language. A student should be taking time to consider whether a passage is using synecdoche or metonymy, which is a distinction most high schoolers haven't encountered before. Speed-based platforms actively discourage that deliberation. If you're looking for something that works better for sustained practice, the less flashy options tend to be more effective. Edpuzzle lets you embed figurative language identification questions directly into video clips, which forces a pause-and-think moment that a rapid-fire quiz cannot. LitLinks and similar annotation tools let students highlight figurative language in full texts, which is closer to how the skill is actually used in literature classes. For a pure practice-and-retry model, I'd suggest sticking with standard LMS quiz tools rather than gamified ones. The extra boredom is the point.
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A practical workflow that works: assign a short set of ten identification questions, require written justification for half of them, follow up with a ten-minute session where students rewrite three literal sentences using specified devices, and collect the work. You'll know who understood it and who didn't within twenty minutes. The rest is overhead you'll repeat every week.
