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October 9, 2008Breathing second life into language teaching |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: An international team has developed a wireless virtual reality environment that can help promote language learning and let students practice. The researchers have demonstrated their Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment with Mexican engineering students carrying out listening comprehension practice in English as a foreign language. Miguel Garcia-Ruiz, Arthur Edwards, and Raul Aquino-Santos of the College of Telematics, at the University of Colima, Mexico, working with Samir El-Seoud of the Princess Sumaya University for Technology, in Amman, Jordan describe their work in detail in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organization. Online virtual reality systems such as Second Life have created a parallel world for entertainment, gaming, learning and even commerce. "Virtual reality is today one of the new frontiers in computer-assisted language learning," they explain, "offering a stimuli-rich environment for language students." DIVE allows users to share a virtual environment over a network, whether that is a local network or the internet. The system has a three-dimensional graphical interface and users can communicate using voice of internet or text chat with each user represented by a representation of themselves, an "avatar" in the three-dimensional space. Previously, DIVE has been used at the University of Colima to teach medical students about various injuries. Realtown has a virtual supermarket, schools, a pharmacy, a bank, etc and background sounds can be enabled to increase the realism. Sounds include traffic noise, children playing, emergency vehicle sirens, and other common environmental noises. In future, users will be able to enter any of the 40 buildings and interact with intelligent agents, which will provide greater opportunities to actually produce language."
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