Week1 Pary -Article Review

Source: Slavic & East European Journal, Spring2010, Vol. 54 Issue 1, p96, 22p
Item: 54357031

Second Language in Second Life: Exploring Interaction, Identity and Pedagogical Practice in a Virtual Slavic East Eur J 54 no1 Spr 2010

“Second Language in Second Life”  has successfully attracted all my attention to the educational potential of Virtual World. Second Life is pointed out  as a brilliant instructional tool for recreating real life encounters in this article. As a result of effective similarity of this detailed virtual technology learners would be able to experience communication challenges in an unpredicted world.

While Web.2 technology would offer a great opportunity to second language learners to have immersive practice time and immense access to popular communities of native speakers of the language they would be interested in, this virtual experience could be occasionally unpleasant.

As another world , Second Life has its own dark places same as real world. “Griefers” (group of cyber bullies) are good example of virtual disturbance creators ( The article has not been really clear or informative about this side of the world, I however might explore and reflect on educational disturbances during my virtual journey during semester).

Aim of study:

The general purpose of this study is simply, to approach the virtual world (mainly Second Life) primarily as a medium of learning foreign languages. This article also reflects on  some conceivable obstacles faced by L2 learners during their virtual interactive experience.

This  reflective study also pursues to prove the existence of a correspondence between language learning and negotiation of meaning  in Second Life.

Methods:

There were two stages of this case study. The first one was a pilot indicative study on five participants. They were all third-year  Russian students and had never been to Russia before.

The other inspection  was done on  five intermediate- to advanced- level Russian language students. These participants had an initial orientation with researcher in the aim of developing their operating skill in Second Life (e.g.  movement skills and in-world chatting)

Data collection:

Each participant spent 30-45 session in Second Life along with researcher. The instructions of this research were open-ended, to communicate with native speakers and obtain as much information as possible about them. Each interaction was being recorded by researcher through screen capture video software (SNAPZ Pro X).

The participants would then have an interview with the researcher and were asked about their intercommunication experience.

Both groups were sent to Moscow Island (launched in September  2007) to intercommunicate with native Russian speakers  within largest Russian community in Second Life.  

Main Findings :

 One of the most interesting findings of this article is the uptake in learners (participants) vocabulary.

The participants were able to understand new  lexical items during  their communication with native speakers. As conversations were built few less familiar words were pointed out by  language learners, the native interlocutors would explain and also give reinforcement on those words in response. The L2 learners were able to use those words later in their in-word chats. 

Another interesting finding is the equal level of anxiety and tension of virtual world “avatar” and real world “face-to-face” communication. Virtual Reality would challenge and motivate learners by providing similar emotional and environmental factors. Individual interviews with participants had illustrated the emotional pressure and social anxiety of their first interactions with native speakers. This social and communicational challenge is considered a golden opportunity for learning language process as the learners would be motivated  to fill their knowledge gap to have a comfortable interaction with other native or advanced speaking avatars.