Virtual Reality in the Teaching of FLE in a Brazilian Public School

Abstract

Considering the emergence of digital information and communication technologies in the contemporary educational context, this work aims to explore the possibilities offered by Virtual Reality (VR) headsets in the school environment, and also to verify how they can contribute to foreign language teaching and learning. The motivation of this work is a result of a pedagogical practice experience carried out by the researcher during French classes in a Brazilian foreign language teaching project in public schools. This pedagogical practice later became the subject of their master's research, which is currently being conducted in the same educational context in two French language classes. The main objective consists of verifying to what extent VR can contribute to foreign language teaching/learning, focusing on the four linguistic competences and motivation. The methodology of this work has a qualitative nature with some quantitative results, and is characterized as Action Research, as the researcher participated in the activities. These activities consisted of using Google Cardboard, a VR headset, to present interactive 360 • videos and tours of real places. The preliminary results show that activities with VR can promote a high level of motivation and engagement, also contributing to the development of the four linguistic competences.

How does artificial intelligence empower EFL teaching and learning nowadays? A review on artificial intelligence in the EFL context

“…It is during the last two decades that Virtual Reality (VR) tools have been widely adopted in foreign language education (Rau et al, 2018 ; Wang et al, 2020 ), exemplified by Google Earth (Chen et al, 2020 ), Google Tour Creator (Nobrega and Rozenfeld, 2019 ), and Google Expeditions (Xie et al, 2021 ). Multiple benefits of applying VR tools in the EFL context have also been validated, for instance, improving vocabulary learning and retention (Lai and Chen, 2021 ; Tai et al, 2022 ), enhancing English speaking and willingness to communicate (Ebadi and Ebadijalal, 2020 ), building ideal 2L self (Adolphs et al, 2018 ), and improving English learning motivation to reduce anxiety (Chien et al, 2020 ).…”

The proliferation of virtual laboratories in educational fields

“…More and more instructors use new educational methodologies based on VR, or augmented reality, to capture the attention of students and motivate them in the study of different subjects. In fact, there are numerous examples of the use of VR to improve the teaching-learning process in many disciplines such as: chemistry (Okamoto et al, 2017;Su and Cheng, 2019), archeology (Monna et al, 2019), robotics (Román-Ibáñez et al, 2018), materials science and engineering (Doblack et al, 2011(Doblack et al, , 2014Flores et al, 2012;Meagher et al, 2014;Tarng et al, 2019;Vergara et al, 2017bVergara et al, , 2019, 3D animation (Ho et al, 2019), languages (Legault et al, 2019;Nobrega and Rozenfeld, 2019), photovoltaic installations (Miguel et al, 2019), history (Utami et al, 2019), gynecology (Chang et al, 2019), anatomy (Weyhe et al, 2018), architecture (Maghool et al, 2018), urban planning (Redondo et al, 2017), dentistry (Juan et al, 2016), surgery (Pan et al, 2015), physics (Daineko et al, 2018), electrical installations (Shao et al, 2018), hydraulics (Mirauda et al, 2019), biomedical engineering (Violante and Vezzetti, 2015), etc. These didactic tools are based on VR but there are different combinations of software and hardware to use them, so that it can be found VLs that, among others: (i) are visualized on a computer screen and handled by mouse and keyboard (Daineko et al, 2018); (ii) are based on augmented reality using a smartphone as a HMD and markers to position virtual elements in the real world (Okamoto et al, 2017); and (iii) are based on immersive virtual reality (IVR) displaying the virtual environment on a HMD and handling the VL with specific controllers (Tarng et al, 2019).…”

“Whoa! Incredible!:” Language Learning Experiences in Virtual Reality

“…For one, the majority of VR research studies conducted have been one-off VR experiences, where participants only use VR once; moreover, these studies have not been carried out with VR apps specifically designed for language teaching and learning (Dhimolea et al, 2022). There have also been fewer studies conducted with kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) learners, with notable exceptions such as Acar and Cavas (2020), Alemi and Khatoony (2020), Nobrega and Rozenfeld (2019), Tai et al (2022), Uygun and Girgin (2022) and Yan Chen et al (2020).…”