Spiritualmedia

 My pilot study was at the beginning difficult to conceive. I was wondering whether I should have interviewed collegues or students in order to understand what are their ideas about virtual worlds, to see how they would react to a teaching and learning method that would intergrate SL in traditional class, but I quickly realized that time isn’t enough and that the results of interviewing could be useless.

At a certain point I started worrying I wouldn’t be able to think about a useful pilot study for my research. That’s how I spent hours surfing the net to end up finding by chance an interesting project called Avatar Languages. They offer you the chance of learning English in a virtual world. How?

http://www.avatarlanguages.com

Through the website above you can buy a series of lessons, better say you can buy a certain amount of minutes which will correspond to a certain amount of lessons: you, as student, decides how long the lesson should be. But you are also offered the chance of booking a free trial lesson, a 15 minutes’ lesson. That’s what I did. I decided to participate as a student.

Before booking the lesson I could take a free online test to evaluate my English language skills and level - listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary. I got a score for each skill. After that I chose a slot to take the free lesson. I received an email resuming my request and my test scores.

In the email it was also explained which tools I would need for the lesson: SL and an avatar, Skype, WhiteBoardMeeting and a Google account in order to access Google docs. It just wasn’t clear whether I should have to met my avatar teacher in SL or Skype. It all became clear when the time of the lesson came and I received a Skype call from Howard Vickers, one of the English mother-tongue teacher working for AvatarEnglish.

That’s how my lesson started. The first question he asked me was what were my interests and why I was interested in studying English online. I told him I absolutely need to improve my English level, but also that what made me chose their online option was that I’m researching virtual worlds sensibilities in order to see if it would be possible to integrate them in an online course or not and how. I told him I’m actually designing an online course for Italian students of elementary Chinese mandarin.

My 15 minutes lesson become an hour one and it also turned out to be interviewing and practicing my English skills. Howard is a really nice and helpful person.

About the lesson: we were talking using Skype. I had to read a text that was in Google docs. While I was reading he highlighted some words I didn’t pronounce correctly. Then he asked me to find some spelling mistakes on the text. Google docs is an interactive tool. Then we moved to Whiteboard: you can write, you can drag and drop texts, images. You can save your project and work on it at anytime. WhiteBoardMeeting is an interactive tool too: is Skype Extra, which means people having access to Skype can meet and work in it at the same time.  He also made me tipe some words on Skype, sort of a dictation.

The funny thing about this ‘interview’ is that we were both interested in each other’s activities. The Avatar English project is based on different technologies. Their students are mostly intermediate or upper-intermediate ones. Howard pointed out the advantages of what they offer: one-to-one lessons with a mother-tongue teacher, flexibility as the student can choose when to take a lesson, tools available for free on the Web, content of lessons based on students’ needs, especially for vocabulary. I discussed withn him whether this method could be used with beginners of a foreign language. It is possible, even though the use of them should probably be a bit different, but we didn’t come up with a solution. I’ll have to figure that out.

Their method is really interactive as far as we talk one-to-one lesson; for groups we were both not so positive. I discovered that he agrees with me that learning a foreign language completely online from the beginning is very very difficult, that e-learning, virtual learning, should be integrated in a face to face context to work. They do much of the teaching using Skype, Whiteboard and Google docs.

As for Second Life they just use it as a social tool. Sometimes they do go on tours with students to show them places where they can go and practice English, for example, in real English contests speaking with English mother-tongue people. Avatar English project created a wordl map where you can find the best community to practice the language you are interested in. At the moment the use of SL is just part of the learning process. It would be difficult to use the same tools within the SL context and have class. I do agree with him. The same tools in SL are not totally free, not everywhere anyway, but having conversations with Avatars in a almost real social contest - Spanish in Barcelona, English in London, French in Paris, Italian in Venise, Chinese in Beijing - could help.