During the fall semester, Professor Carolina Bailey’s Spanish 1 and Spanish 4 classes used virtual reality to practice in-class vocabulary with a new perspective.
This semester was the first pilot test of virtual reality in language classes at Madison College. Students used the program ImmerseMe to practice speaking Spanish in a different context than the traditional classroom experience. Unlike many avatar-based virtual reality, ImmerseMe uses 3-D video clips and images to make the experience as much like visiting another country as possible without leaving the Madison College campus.
The idea of using virtual reality in language classes was one Professor Bailey has been investigating for a while.
“A year and a half ago I received an article from another faculty here, Lindsay Amiel,” said Bailey. “She sent me an email like hey look what I just ran into! And it was an article about virtual reality in languages, and when I read it, I was hooked.”
It has long been said that the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in it. But since many students do not have the means to physically travel abroad for language study, in-class virtual reality gives them a more accessible opportunity for immersion. Virtual reality was held during some of the scheduled class sessions, so the experience was built into the curriculum.
While immersed in virtual reality, students visited homes, restaurants and plazas from countries where Spanish is primarily spoken and interacted with the people there in conversations related to class topics.
The activities reinforced the vocabulary and sentence structures learned in the classroom and increased exposure to culture.
Because the program is so new to Madison College, technical problems are still being discovered and addressed.
Early in the semester, virtual reality class sessions were moved to the Truax campus’s Gateway entrance so that students could spread out more and minimize audio overlap. Even so, issues with the program not recognizing certain words and phrases arose. As the semester progressed, problems such as these were looked into and remedied by Bailey and Bill Ballo, the extended reality center coordinator at Madison College.
Although this past semester was the first in which virtual reality was used as a part of in-class instruction in language classes, Bailey hopes it will not be the last.
“We are actively looking for funding to be able to have this to be an ongoing thing. So right now there is potential funding to have this for next semester and for other years,” Bailey said.