A new way for learning languages through virtual inmmersive environments

Abstract

Immersive virtual environments or metaverse are representations of real or imaginative worlds created on the digital world with the purpose of making real situations or impossible experiences in the real world -- Users on these worlds represent themselves via avatars that interact in representation of the user. At present, these virtual worlds are used for business processes, research and education -- The purpose of this article is to describe the process of adapting an immersive virtual environment to be used as a virtual teaching-learning tool of the English language as a second language -- The immersive virtual world was tested in a learning environment, and the results of the evaluation is presented -- This research started with the identification of the adequate immersive platform, students group selection, test design and implementation in order to determining if it is more successful to teach over a virtual immersive environment or in the real classroom -- We proposed the hypothesis : “the Second Life tool is, at least, as effective in teaching a second language, in this case English, in A2 level students in the Common European Framework as the face-to-face mode.” and in order to validate it, a set of experiments were conducted -- Different measures of results were given comparing the performance of an experimental group against a control group -- The results of the experiments show that the experimental, using the virtual environment, has better improvement compared to the control group -- These results indicate that virtual immersive environments are efficient tools, useful in teaching-learning language processes