My Blogathon Comments 8

So here are the perceptions of my students who used “Second Life” as an English practicing tool throughout past week.

The experiences were varied: some loved it and some didn’t really!!!

Those who liked it indicated that they enjoyed creating new identities (Avatars) for themselves, communicating with other residents using English without fear of making mistakes, learning new things, and exploring a new world full of strange places and people!

But then the rest of students said that they didn’t like the site, as they had found it extremely boring (!) and hard to use mainly due to slow internet connection and not meeting the technical requirements. They also said that they wasted several hours online which they could use for studying instead. Finally, some complained about being harassed by a few residents.

Despite this, mulling over the experience, I still think that Virtual worlds can be fun places to practice languages, but it seems that this technology still needs further development to make the glitches less and also provide free safe environments for this aim.

Moreover, I believe I could get better results if I’d been better prepared by reading relevant research studies when introducing the site to the students and had assigned specific tasks for them to do rather than have them wander aimlessly. Finally, I could manage the risks better if instead of individual exploration of the world, I had them do it in groups to support one another in this virtual world.