Sunya: Week 5

Hi Everyone,
I found an interesting article and would like to talk about it sharing with everyone.

Second life: Anxiety-free language learning?

This article aims to support the notion that Second Life is the platform for anxiety free language learning. The article presents the main characteristic of SL, talks about Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and foreign language anxiety. It carries out the experiment to determine whether anxiety levels in face to face communication and communication in a virtual world environment difer.

The article concludes that SL is an potential alternative environment for language teaching and learning and its experiment may shed some light on SL's appropriateness for language teaching and learning.

It would be more interesting to see in depth discussion on how and why SL is the platform for anxiety free language learning. According to Krashen (1988) anxiety can impede foreign language production and achievement and interaction is often found among anxiety. SL may give students anxiety free in learning language because it does not involve face to face communication. He/she projects his/her identity into virtual space. However, in the real world, individual may have different identity when speaking different language. Someone might say that I feel like a differnt person when I speak another language. This is because language is bounded up with a sense of identity. I would like to bring up what Steven says is that Second Life blurs the boundaries between single and multiple selves. The question is therefore can SL be used as a way of allowing language learners to explore new identities as speakers of other language. How might teachers hardness SL to this end?

References 

 Warburton, S. (2008). KILT conference King's college London, Retrieved from http://www.prime-lab.org

Couto, S., M. Second Life: Anxiety free for lanaguage learning? International Conference ICT for language learning (3rd edition)

Krashen, S., D. (1988). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning.  Prentice-Hall International