Sunya: Week 3

Hi Everyone

So far I have been enjoying learning this paper. Now, I am going to share what I have read on the article called: Attitude and Self-efficacy Change: English Learning in Virtual Worlds. This article explores what factors that are effectives in learning English as a foreing language in a 3D game like virtual world, Quest Atlantis (QA; http://QuestAtlantis.org). It uses quantitative reseaarch methods to compare the difference between the QA and non QA group in terms of measuring of attitude and self-efficacy toward English language learning, English achiement test scores, and responses to English writing prompts. Participants of 42 females and 19 males Chinese students are from the Monkey King Middle School (MKMS), China. They are divided into 31 students in QA group and 30 students in non QA group. Both groups attend their regular English classes during the study.

The article does not produce a clear result that QA group is better than non QA group. However, the over all picture of how to teach English in mainland Chinese classrooms provides an oppotunity to enchance learning with authentic tasks that require students to engage in critical thinking and self reflection durring asynchromous interaction with QA related back stories and quests, as well as synchronous avatar based chat. Therefore, the potential of virtual worlds should be explored further to make English learners more confident.

According to Nieminen (2006), one of the best way to learn a foreign language is to be exposed to real situations in which it must be used to communicate. Considerable advantages can be obtained by introducing collaborative activities (Zhag, 2010), promoting the participants' interaction with the enviroment and other members of the community. These are in line with the outcome of this article. However, this article is needed to do more research exploring sufficient practical suggestions on how to apply virtual world in Foreign language settings.

References

Zheng, D., Young, M., Brewer, R., & Wagner, M. (2009). Attitude and self-efficacy change: english language learning in virtual worlds. CALICO Journal, 27(1), 205-231.

Nieminen, K. (2006). Aspects of Learning Foreign Languages and Learning WITH Foreign Languages: Language Immersion and

CLIL. Development Project Report, Jyvaskyla, Finland: Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences.

Zhang, Y. (2010). Cooperative Language Learning and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching.

Journal of Language Teachingand Research, 1
(1), 81-83.