The concept of virtual reality has been around for many years. However, it is only in the past year that it is now starting to be sold commercially to the mass market. It is sold by mobile phone manufacturers as an accessory to their mobile phones and it is also used for gaming.
Could virtual reality be the next technology heading to the language classroom? This technology has huge potential and could potentially revolutionise classroom learning.
There are several different potential uses of this in the classroom, one idea that I had in mind was for a vocabulary lesson. The students could explore an area or place such as a forest or a football stadium. The teacher could guide the students through these virtual areas pointing out different lexical items.
One advantage of this approach is that it could save valuable classroom time in trying to explain certain words. The teacher could simply point to vocabulary items. This potential advantage could also be seen as a disadvantage. The process of explaining the word to a student may potentially take longer however it is mentioned by some cognitive psychologists that an approach that uses deeper processing can be more advantageous to learning (Marton and Saljo, 1976 and Harmon et al, 2010).
This approach could be suited to learners with visual learning styles. Al-Sheri (2009) suggested in his study that tasks involving more visual learning will aid these types of students in their understanding. He went onto mention that it can also lead to an increase in motivation and engagement.
With many schools not having large financial budgets, it is difficult to see the implementation of this on a large scale in the near future. However, as with any technology the price of this will decrease and in the next 2-3 years this may be an affordable option for many schools in the future.
As always, I would love to hear from you on this. Has anyone used virtual reality in the classroom? Do you think it is a gimmick or could it add real value to the classroom?
References
Al-Shehri, A. S. (2009). Motivation and vision: The relation between the ideal L2 self, imagination and visual style. Motivation, language identity and the L2 self, 164-171.
Harmon, J. M., Buckelew-Martin, E., & Wood, K. D. (2010). The cognitive vocabulary approach to word learning. English Journal, 100-107.
Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On Qualitative Differences in Learning: I-Outcome and process. British journal of educational psychology, 46(1), 4-11.
Technology in Tesol 