Teaching language via second life: The good, the bad, and the future

Abstract

Virtual worlds provide teachers with new and exciting ways to engage students; researchers believe that their capabilities to simulate authentic experiences and enable collaboration and interaction among users make virtual worlds a very useful tool for the future of education. This paper explores the ways that a virtual world, Second Life, has been used within traditional “brick and mortar” language classrooms and considers whether it has been used effectively. The findings in this paper show that researchers have used various methods to integrate Second Life into their classrooms, and some have been more effective than others. This paper recommends that future researchers allocate more time to becoming familiar with Second Life, put more consideration into the types of learning tasks students will perform in Second Life, and focus more on quantitative analysis that measures growth and acquisition of cognitive language skills as a result of instruction in Second Live versus instruction in the traditional classroom.