THE USE OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Nataliia Borysenko

According to recent research, a virtual environment (VE) is a type of technology that can be used for teaching and learning to support student achievement. The three research studies included here examine how the use of virtual environments might support language learning and how they may be integrated into language tasks to enhance learners’ language (and technology) outcomes. The first, an exploratory study, examines how language learning affordances of VEs can be integrated into tasks and how English language learners (ELLs) use and perceive them. Four adult international ELLs participated in the study. The results suggest that (a) in general, the students perceived the use of the VE for language learning as effective; (b) to support ELLs’ learning in the VE, tasks should require students to use both direct and indirect affordances continuously during the task. The second study applies Flow Theory (Csikszentmihályi, 1975, 2000) to explore how the use of VEs may increase ELLs’ engagement. The findings suggest that (a) most ELLs experienced flow during the task in Minecraft; (b) involvement in the VE itself does not mean that learners are involved in the actual task. The third, a case study, examines whether and how language learners (LLs) engage in tasks enhanced by the use of VEs and what language they learn. Twenty-one adult students, of which 17 are American and four international LLs, completed two tasks in the Minecraft VE with the purpose of learning some Esperanto vocabulary. Both tasks were created based on engagement principles. The results indicate that (a) the majority of the participants were engaged when using Minecraft during language tasks; (b) social interaction contributed the most to the LLs’ engagement in both tasks; (c) the collaborative nature of the tasks ensured effective participants’ interaction and supported peer scaffolding; (d) some participants’ perceived lack of balance in the task challenge and their skills influenced their engagement negatively; this, in turn, may have affected their achievement; (e) participants perceived that VE-enhanced tasks facilitated language outcomes and need to be incorporated in their future teaching. All three studies discuss implications for practice and future research.

THE USE OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

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