Week 2: Academic Blog

This article is mainly studied teaching language in the second life, what impact will be brought to students and society. There are two aspects studied in this article. The first aspect is during the two task-based language teaching, is there any benefits or challenges will be met. Another task is how to reflect the development and implementation process of the teaching consciousness in in-world change.

The qualitative analysis was used by this article. Participants included four teachers from Australia and Taiwan, and 144 CFL undergraduate students from Australian university. This study focus on the Chinese language teaching by four different teachers—the teaching are mainly completed by Chinese teachers, and Australian teachers to give some support. The whole teaching purpose is to provide students with more opportunities to practice Chinese. In Second Life, teachers built 3 different activity units which are “Pair the Friends”, “Family Day” and “Clues in the Maze” to make students can practice Chinese according to their requirement. Teachers also can adjust the teaching units by received students’ feedback.

Through the research above, there are 4 conclusions showed in this article. The first one is Second Life could provides opportunities to set a clear goal. Secondly, it could ensure that student will be the center and authentic learning methods. Thirdly, it makes the opportunities for language input, production, and feedback varied. The last one is this provide a comfortable learning environment.

With more educational institutions would like to use the network platform to carry out teaching, how to reduce the common technical problems has become the primary challenge. And this requires educators and researchers work harder in order to make this kind of network platform better to adapt the educational purpose and more benefits to language learner.

Lin, T., Wang, S., Grant, S., Chien, C., & Lan, Y. (2014). Task-based Teaching Approaches of Chinese as a Foreign Language in Second Life through Teachers’ Perspectives. Procedia Technology, 13(SLACTIONS 2013: Research conference on virtual worlds - Learning with simulations), 16-22.