A Case Study: Students’ Perception of a Collaborative Game-Based Virtual Learning Environment

Abstract

The English education course in China aims to help students establish the English skills necessary to enhance their international competitiveness. However, traditional English classes often lack the linguistic environment to enable students to apply the English skills they have learned from their textbook. Virtual reality (VR) technology can create an immersive English language environment and then encourage the learners to use English by presenting different collaborative communication tasks. Thus, to promote learners in using the target language skills this study applied a spherical video-based virtual reality technology to build a linguistic environment, and a collaborative learning strategy was adopted to promote their communication. Additionally, a mixed-methods research approach was used to analyze students' achievement in a traditional classroom and a virtual reality supported collaborative classroom and to evaluate their perception of the two approaches. The experimental results revealed that the collaborative classroom, supported by virtual reality, was able to enhance students' achievements. Moreover, analysis of student interviews identified their attitudes towards the virtual-reality-supported collaborative class and the use of language learning strategies in those classes. These findings could be a valuable reference for those who intend to create opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate in the target language in their classroom and then improve their language skills.