Using Second Life to stimulate learners oral production

Contenido de la comunicación

I’ve been in Second Life¹ for almost 3 years now and have had the chance to observe and participate in many language classes and activities. During this last year I started my own project, Italianiamo. Knowing my limits and the time I could invest in it, I decided to focus on what virtual worlds² do at their best: make people talk to each other.

Therefore, Italianiamo is not a language course: we do not have a syllabus to follow and we do not “do” grammar. In our activities, I don’t ask learners to use this or that structure, rather I try to stimulate their free oral production. I simply prepare the activity, when needed we go over some useful vocabulary together, and then I step aside to let the learners interact in the Italian language, helping them to overcome their communication difficulties or encouraging the conversation flow when needed.

Consequently, my task and main problem in SL³ is to find or create a set of stimuli and to see how I can exploit them to make learners talk in a foreign language.

In this short paper I would like to share my experiences and reflections, focusing primarily on one of the many “tools” that can be used to trigger communication: SL itself and above all SL places.

SL: a year-long full immersion.

When I arrived in SL and started exploring this new world I was struck by the number, interest, and variety of existing places. They are there, ready to use and to interact with. In addition, they are often inhabited by native speakers and owners⁴ usually do not object if you bring a small, well-behaved group of learners to visit their land⁵.

I would say that SL is a kind of dreamland for language teachers, above all if they are living and teaching abroad: it’s almost like being in the country you want to learn the language of, a cheap and quick surrogate for Italy, in my case.

Actually, SL allows a kind of full immersion. It’s somehow even better: it’s spread over the year, not condensed into the two weeks or one month summer courses we are used to. Yet, as you can understand, the perfect world has not been invented, and one comes across problems here too. Let’s look at what some of them are:

Making people talk

We all know very well that to just throw learners in a new, unfamiliar place and ask them to talk about it does not work. People talk about what they know, not about what they ignore. I would imagine that in that case they would limit themselves to looking around, ask some questions and make some short remarks, while probably the teacher would be tempted to explain and speak too much in order to cover the embarrassing silence.

But it’s they who need to talk and practice the language, not me! I assure you that my Italian is pretty good and I do not need to visit virtual worlds to practice and improve my fluency.

The solution I often hear is:

a) ask learners to prepare the topic somehow, for instance by consulting Wikipedia, in order to explain it to class,

or

b) divide learners into small groups and send them out to visit a place and then report on it to the class.

 This might work very well in a “normal class”, where students have homework and are presumably willing (or obliged) to spend some of their free time in doing it. Italianiamo is not a “class”, people just drop in -when they can and feel like- to talk in a relaxed and stimulating environment. They enjoy learning and talking in Italian and that’s what they are there for.

 However, I wonder whether explaining what one read the night before is real, spontaneous communication. Do people feel the need to explain to each other everything about the Cathedral of Milan or are they simply fulfilling a task? Is it relevant and important for them to explain everything they just learned on a topic decided on by their teacher?

I wanted to try something different, and since my activities are free and I have no boss to report to, I could dare to risk more. Participants know that we are all learning and experimenting together and therefore are more willing to accept failures and little disasters on my part.

Using SL spaces to talk in a foreign language

In order to use existing places we pretended to be improvised tourist guides, inventing the history of the region we were visiting on the basis of a very scarce information (namely: the Real Life⁶ image of some of the attractions of the Apulia region and some key words that could be useful), discussed the ideal architecture and function of a creativity hub (a project that had been developed both in RL⁷ and SL), visited a car factory trying to understand together how cars are manufactured, went to a bookstore to talk about how we choose books and our preferences in literature, discovered SL art in a gallery, talked about our tastes in an Italian fashion and design showroom, dreamed about holidays in a travel agency, went through what we usually do in airports while waiting for our flight in...a virtual airport, followed and gave directions in the twisting little streets of the Rome district of Trastevere. We even went out to dinner together once.

The preparation of these activities represented an enjoyable challenge for me and much satisfaction. Let’s look at what one has to keep in mind when organising these kinds of activities:

Finding suitable places

First of all, I had to find the place: an interesting Italian land.

Not an easy and quick task, since as you can imagine, the percentage of interesting places that can be used for learning Italian is very low compared to English ones, and yes, it’s true: many SL places are boring, empty shopping malls. 

In addition, Italian land owners, in an understandable attempt to make their land accessible and enjoyable by more visitors, often also (or only) offer information in English, thus somehow disrupting the sensation that we are immersed in an Italian environment.

Moreover, places sometimes disappear. It happened in the early days of the World Wide Web too, as a colleague was telling me not long ago. He, a real early adopter of the ICT for language teaching, found more than once that the page he had used the previous term were not online anymore, and that instead of improving his lesson plan on the basis of past experience, he had to start (almost) from scratch again.

The same thing is happening in SL now because Second life is now as young as the web was back then. It’s quite common that, after having found a wonderful place, designed an activity, and tested it you find out that you have to start everything anew because that land has changed, or worse, is not there, nor anywhere, any more. This sometimes happens even while one is thinking of an activity: the little district with intricate streets is now reduced to a mere square and the beautiful island⁸ became a sort of ugly suk.

This, for the teacher who has spent sometimes weeks combing the metaverse⁹ for suitable places, is a real loss of time and energy and can be very discouraging. I hope and believe that in the future SL will become stable in this sense, more like the Internet we know nowadays, with a large offering of places that “stay there”, and that we can utilize for our teaching activities.

Coming to term with reality in virtual reality

Once you've found a place, what you are going to do there and how you are going to use it do not depend only on your ideas and aims: you are a guest on someone else land, and therefore we cannot do anything we might want to there.

The owner of the land can restrict the ability of its visitors to fly¹⁰, run scripts¹¹, rez¹² objects, take landmarks¹³, teleport¹⁴ directly from one point to the other, or even talk¹⁵.

This is very understandable, since in this way the owner is avoiding griefers¹⁶ attacks and keeps his or her land clean and tidy. As a consequence, you need to check and come to terms with your restricted perms¹⁷... and be careful: perms can vary from one spot to the other of the same land!

Therefore, it’s useless to plan a nice scavenger hunt with the help of huds¹⁸ or other scripted objects if your scripts will not work there, or to prepare a board for some brainstorming if you cannot rez any object. It’s better to first find out what you will be allowed to do and then design the activity accordingly.

But, most important of all, is to know what your learners can do in SL. Do they have the right skills to perform what you are asking of them? How is their connection? Do they usually experience lag¹⁹? Finding out about their level and abilities beforehand will let you design your activities accordingly, and spare you from having to spend the first hour explaining how to do this or that. And yes, understanding an explanation and asking for help can be a very good exercise, but it’s also a bit frustrating and tiring if in the end you do not manage to do anything else.

Meeting native speakers

Native speakers are one of the primary reasons we are all here. To have the chance to meet people from almost all over the world and speak with them is one the main strengths of SL.

In SL, it is quite easy to start a conversation, much easier than in RL, I would say. In RL, it’s not normal in our daily lives to stop a passer-by and begin a conversation. If you don’t believe me, just try it! Walk into a plaza in RL and start talking with the people who are there. Unless you are in your 20s (and the person you are talking to is as well) they will probably stare at you, thinking that you have some mental problem. But in SL, this is a normal and completely acceptable behaviour, maybe because we all look as if we were in our early 20s in SL.

Thus, people in SL can give you and your group of learners nice surprises: they can invite you on a guided tour of their island, or you can end up chatting about local languages and cultures. When it happens, just forget about the planned activity and grab the occasion that is being offered.

I would not base my activities on “going around and meet people”, however. First of all it’s something learners can do on their own, they do not need my help. Also, I noticed that they usually tend to speak more to people they already know and are at ease with, and that it’s often difficult for them to participate in a discussion among native speakers. As a matter of fact, most of the participants of Italianiamo are level A2/A2+, and, in my personal experience as a language learner, by the time you understand what someone is saying, someone else is already answering, and it’s hard to find the right moment to speak.

In any case, native speakers are motivating: I mean, we are learning a language to talk to them, not to our teacher. They offer a wonderful occasion for listening to (and understanding) the “real” language, a chance to hear different accents and to experience first hand a new culture, without filters. That’s why I chose to open Italianiamo to native speakers: they are always welcome to join us in our activities. 

Do we always have to go somewhere?

Of course not! Sometimes to stay at home is the best solution. We do not need to go to a theatre to discuss: “Do you go to the theatre?”. We need to go to a theatre if we are going to attend a performance and then compare our opinions about it (this last is best if done in a quiet bar). To talk about the last performance we went to, there's nothing better than a cosy lounge.

In a RL classroom you have many tools (chalkboard, photocopy machine, cd player, video player, the room you are in with it’s walls and objects, if you are lucky a projector, if you are even more lucky an interactive digital blackboard...) and each time you choose which one is the best to perform the task at hand. The same happens in SL: you have some tools (voice²⁰, chat, different lands, different settings, objects in your inventory²¹, etc.) and it’s how you use them that determines the success (or not) of your class/activity.

There are times when it’s better to stay home: when you need to use boards or other tools, for example, or when you want to use objects or a scene you have prepared. And since teleporting is easy and quick, you can decide to introduce the topic of the day at home and then journey together to see a place that will work as further stimulus.

A land of your own

Owing land is very useful.

At the beginning of my Second Life I did not see the point of owning or renting a place of my own. I thought that those who had a land simply wanted to play houses. I mean: you have sandboxes²² if you want to try to build²³ something, and it’s much more fun to go around than to stay home and offer tea with biscuits to friends.

I tended to (mis)judge those who kept their activities in their “places” as people who did not understand the real potential of SL. I was wrongly convinced that they were afraid of taking their learners out of the classroom (by which I mean not just a four-walls room, it can be a park or a whole theme-based land) for fear of losing them, for fear that what they found in the outside world would be much more interesting (and useful for learning languages) than what they offered. A senseless fear, since a good teacher, in SL or in RL, is more than merely a native speaker, and offers an added value.

Needless to say, I have changed my mind to some degree. I still think that to be in SL and not to grab the opportunities it offers is a pity, but having a place on your own not only let you use more of SL (rezzing objects or settings and games you have prepared, for instance) but also because it’s nice to have a quiet place to meet, a landing point for those who want to participate in your activities, and an information hub for those who want to know more about what you do.

It's tough, but worthwhile

I have the impression that I have pointed out so many “problems” and “difficulties” one has to deal with that you are probably wondering why you should take the trouble to give it a try. This was not my intention. As I said before, I’m an enthusiast of this new world and of its potential for teaching languages.

Second Life and all the other virtual worlds that have mushroomed into existence in these last years are a new tool for all of us, one we should explore to see their pros and cons, their strengths and limits, what we can do and what is technically not viable, what we can use them for and what is achieved best via other tools. Although we may find many obstacles in our path, we also enjoy the freedom of being able to make mistakes, and to learn from them, without any big drawbacks: our learners are also curious and willing to try out new ways of learning, and to risk and explore, otherwise they would not be here.

Learners in SL are usually very motivated and eager to find more occasions to practice the language, and their improvement in fluency is awesome: those who at the beginning were looking up words in online dictionaries are now able to go to Italian lands and make friends, those who studied a foreign language long ago saw how it came back to them with very little effort, and those who at first were too shy for speaking and kept using the chat soon found themselves talking into their microphones without even noticing it.

I think that the “secret” is that to learn a foreign language here has an immediate purpose: to talk with other people, whether other learners or native speakers, and to know each others and do things together. We are not all closed in our classroom, we move inside the space of a large, new world still to be explored, we share a space that allows us to do, see, and live things together, we share opinions, give each other advice, help each other, get involved in projects and activities. And to do all of it we need to talk, talk, talk. And it’s as easy, and as immediate, as teleporting.

NOTAS:

Bibliografía/Referencias

• Global Kids’ Second Life curriculum. Global Kid. Web. 27 Sept. 2009. http://www.globalkids.org/?id=117

• Are you ready to teach in SL? University of Cincinnati. Web. 27 Sept. 2009. http://www.quibblo.com/quiz/7--PShe/Are-you-ready-to-teach-in-Second-Life

• Mychael Rymaszenwki et al. Second Life: the official guide. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2007

• Aimee Weber et al. Creating your world: the official guide to advanced content creation for second life. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008.

Reconocimiento - Nocomercial - CompartirIgual (CC-by-sa 3.0 o cualquier otra posterior)