Week 3：Academic Blog

This article was tried to assess the usage of teaching English language in Second Life at tertiary level. The data collected in a comprehensive way from the instructors who had experienced it. The aims of it are the opinions of participants for teaching language in Second Life, the benefits and challenges of using Second Life in language teaching.

The qualitative analysis was used by this article. The participants are five instructors from different Turkish university. Through structured interviews, data were collected and analyzed by with code and theme identification. For these data, it was divided into three parts to analyze.

The first part, it was aimed on the language skills. They found that all of participants mentioned that Second Life could help people to improve the speaking and listening skills. The students’ improvements of writing skills are also mentioned by two instructors.

The second part is the benefits of using Second Life in language teaching. The main benefit is every teacher could design their class through their requirements, perspectives and cases—it makes the class flexible and changeable. Next, provided both synchronous and asynchronous education which means it will not limit the time and place anymore. Then, it provides an effective environment in order to share the course materials online. Moreover, there will not have any limit for how many people could in one room. Last, Second Life provides an English language environment which could help people learning English.

The third part is the challenges of using Second Life in language teaching. They are technical, financial and user-related challenges. It needs a good graphic, voice cards and the Internet connection was highlighted. They have to pay for many materials and essential equipments to begin a class. And to design a virtual environment always take users too much time.

 

Sarac, H. S. (2014). Benefits and Challenges of Using Second Life in English Teaching: Experts’ Opinions. Procedia - Social And Behavioral Sciences, 158(14th Language, Literature and Stylistics Symposium), 326-330.