IMMERSE insights:
- The IMMERSE company partners with researchers from 29 universities around the world to ensure that the IMMERSE language app is effective.
- Studies conducted at Chuo University in Japan showed students’ scores on the TOEIC speaking test improved after just a few hours of English lessons in the IMMERSE VR platform.
- The students in the study also reported they learned English more easily and recalled what they learned better through immersion in VR with IMMERSE.
Research partnership: IMMERSE and Chuo University
Research is critical to IMMERSE, and we partner with expert VR language learning researchers from universities around the world to ensure that our application is effective.
All 30+ of our Research Partners conduct studies to determine exactly how using IMMERSE can help students improve their language abilities so we can continue to provide our Members with the most optimal learning experience possible.
One of our partners, Professor Yukie Saito, conducted two pilot studies over the past two years with students from Chuo University in Japan.
Both of these studies showed that IMMERSE lessons not only benefited students’ English-speaking skills, but also improved their confidence and decreased their foreign language anxiety.
This is just the beginning of her research, and her findings so far are quite promising!
Let’s dive into what she did for both studies.
Study 1
Prof. Saito’s first study examined whether students’ English-speaking abilities were improved by taking lessons in IMMERSE.
She also measured the impact of immersion in VR on students’ foreign language anxiety.
Specifically, she had 8 Japanese learners of English take five 40-minute lessons (totaling 200 minutes of instruction) in IMMERSE over a two-month period.
Students took classes in IMMERSE virtual reality scenes such as the Airport, the City Center, and the Restaurant.
Prof. Saito measured students’ English-speaking abilities two times:
1) at the beginning of the study, before they took any lessons in IMMERSE and
2) at the end, after they had taken their lessons.
An internationally recognized proficiency exam called the TOEIC Speaking Test was used for this.
By having students take this speaking test at the beginning and end of the study, she was able to see if they had improved their scores after taking lessons in IMMERSE.
She also measured students’ levels of foreign language anxiety at the beginning and end of the study, using a 33-question questionnaire that is widely used in this type of research.
This allowed her to see whether taking lessons in IMMERSE helped students become less anxious while speaking English.
Upon examining the data, Prof. Saito found that students had improved their TOEIC Speaking Test scores from an average of 117.5 at the beginning of the study to 127.5 by the end (a perfect score on the test is 200 points).
That’s a 10-point difference (or an 8.5% increase) after spending only 200 minutes taking lessons in IMMERSE!
She also found that taking just five lessons in IMMERSE lowered students’ anxiety by 11%!
When digging into why this was the case, students made comments such as “I could speak more easily because each member’s face is [an] avatar!” and “I was not afraid of getting tense because I cannot see each other face, so this lesson enabled me to try to convey my opinion to anyone smoothly.”
Her students also mentioned that IMMERSE’s visuals and realistic 3D scenarios helped their learning.
One student commented, “I think that English conversation lessons using VR allow students to learn English effectively using sight and hearing. In fact, I can accurately recall every lesson with visuals.”
Study 2
In her second study, Prof. Saito looked at how lessons in IMMERSE impacted language learners’ speaking skills and their own perceptions of their abilities.
This time, she had 13 English as a Foreign Language learners take three 45-minute lessons (totaling 135 minutes of instruction) in IMMERSE. These lessons were designed to help learners improve their presentational speaking skills and centered around teaching students to discuss, debate, and present their opinions.
As in her first study, Prof. Saito measured students’ English-speaking abilities at the beginning and end of the study using TOEIC Speaking Tests.
Students also self-assessed their English presentational skills using CEFR Can Do Statements at the beginning and end of the study. This allowed Prof. Saito to also see whether students felt that IMMERSE had helped them improve.
This time, students improved their TOEIC Speaking Test scores from an average of 125.5 at the beginning of the study to 131.8 by the end. That’s a 6.3-point difference (or a 5% increase)! This increase was smaller than what Prof. Saito saw in her first study, but this is expected since students had only spent 135 minutes in IMMERSE, compared to 200 minutes the first time. So, these results show that more time in IMMERSE = greater improvement in speaking abilities.
Students’ self-assessments of their own English presentational skills also improved by 32%, meaning that students thought learning in VR helped them learn how to discuss, debate, and present their opinions. 98.8% of students also responded either “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” when asked whether or not VR language lessons in IMMERSE improved their English skills compared to regular English courses!
The results of both of these studies are very encouraging! They also echo previous research on how highly contextualized immersion language learning experiences, such as the ones that IMMERSE offers, benefit language learning.
