Description
The researchers conducted an eight-week experiment on E-tandem in self-designed immersive Virtual Reality (VR) rooms. Sixteen volunteer students from XJTLU, including 8 international students and 8 Chinese domestic students, formed E-tandem pairs to participate in the project. Five pairs of E-tandem practiced language and cultural tasks in pre-designed immersive VR rooms as the experiment group, while another 3 pairs in the control group used Tencent meeting. Pre-designed language and cultural task sheets under selected themes were distributed to students before their meetings.The collected data includes recordings of the Mozilla Hub VR rooms, recordings of Tencent meeting rooms, participants’ self-reflections in a post-experiment questionnaire, and individual interviews with three students. According to the participants’ feedback in the questionnaire and the interviews, VR technology is effective in supporting students’ interaction and enhancing cross-cultural communication. The game-like immersive environment also relieved students’ anxiety when speaking the target language.
With all the positive feedback collected, the researcher is interested in delving deeper into the students’ communication process to understand who was included in the conversation, and how inclusiveness happened. The researcher observes the recordings of the VR rooms and Tencent meeting rooms under the framework of discourse analysis and has tried to unpack the interaction modes with social norm, interactional norm, and individual agency considered.
The researcher, and also this session’s presenter, will share two themes’ interaction details as examples and discuss the possible reasons for certain comments that appeared in the questionnaire. For example, most international students in the VR room mentioned that they enjoyed practicing Chinese language and gained more confidence, while a few Chinese students still felt anxious about speaking English.
| Period | 2 Nov 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The 7th CLE Conference on Teaching and Learning: Unleashing the Potential: Leveraging AI and Technology for Effective Language Teaching and Learning |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Shenzhen, ChinaShow on map |