The IMMERSE virtual world is an ideal place to learn a language, designed to reduce learners’ anxiety about speaking in a foreign language and to recruit the brain’s natural tendency to learn from context. However, there is far more behind IMMERSE’s effectiveness than just its 40+ interactive scenes.
Our live immersive language lessons, active learning community, and communication-focused practice activities all contribute to making IMMERSE a powerful tool for learning English, Spanish, and French.
The pedagogy behind our lessons was carefully developed to maximize the educational advantages of learning languages through live interaction in VR.
PEDAGOGICAL FRAMEWORKS
The immersive and highly interactive nature of the IMMERSE platform lends itself optimally to lessons that use an experiential, task-based learning approach that elicits emergent language for our skilled teachers to build on. This integration of technological affordances and experiential, communicative language teaching is a highly effective combination for workforce training, where authentic real-world practice is essential and students must become empowered to use their language skills in any situation that might arise in the course of their work.
IMMERSE pulls from several different methodologies and frameworks, including experiential learning, communicative language teaching, task-based language teaching, emergent language, and TPACK. Just like when planning for classroom based or online courses, effective VR language course design requires consideration of the learning objectives to be accomplished, the relevant pedagogical approaches, and the affordances of virtual reality. Lastly, we also ensure that all components of our educational offering are designed to support the development of learners’ cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional engagement.
Experiential Learning
Experiential learning can be seen as a cyclical learning process where learners have a concrete experience in which they engage directly with an authentic situation. During and after this experience, they notice and think about what happened, tying the experience to previous experiences and conceptual understandings. This reflection on the experience evolves into abstract conceptualization, in which the learners distill their perceptions into new conceptual understandings. This prompts them to test their new ideas by applying them to a new concrete experience, and so the cycle continues.
IMMERSE understands that language training based on experiential learning is crucial for employees to develop language skills applicable to real world concepts and to develop a sense of themselves as speakers of a new language and members of a new cultural community. Repeated practice using language to accomplish tasks typical of the workplace, such as collaborating on a project, asking for clarification, or politely denying a request, prepares learners to interact in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways on the job as well.
Emergent Language
Emergent language is language that arises spontaneously as learners attempt to communicate their thoughts and ideas in a new language. While teachers can predict and plan for vocabulary and grammar that are likely to come up in a given lesson, there will always be unpredicted language related to the learners’ jobs, viewpoints, and personalities.
At IMMERSE, we understand it is precisely this language that learners need to learn in order to express themselves and communicate effectively at work. Our teachers are trained to incorporate this spontaneous language into lessons as it arises, and all lessons make space for this kind of learning.
Communicative Language Teaching
Communicative language teaching emphasizes the importance of interactions in acquiring a new language, and throughout every lesson IMMERSE incorporates highly interactive communicative activities such as role plays, interviews, and opinion sharing. We also include many task-based activities like information gaps and group work.
Having learners collaborate on tasks that work towards a non-linguistic outcome, like constructing a shelter or setting up for a happy hour together, ensures that they focus on pragmatic meaning and learn to draw on the words and language they already know to communicate effectively. This both fosters confidence and also provides a context for figuring out what words or skills they still need to learn.
Cognitive, Behavioral, and Socio-Emotional Engagement
IMMERSE’s core educational offerings have been carefully designed around three types of engagement: cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional. When these three types of engagement are unlocked, learners have the optimal conditions for language acquisition.
Behavioral Engagement refers to how active learners are in the learning process. For example, a learner who consistently attends lessons each week and completes AI-practice activities would be considered to have a high level of behavioral engagement. We know that behavioral engagement leads to better cognitive and socio-emotional engagement, so we encourage and foster key learner behaviors in a number of ways. For example, learners each have a dashboard that allows them to track how many classes and conversation hours they attend. IMMERSE also nudges ideal behaviors by incentivizing learners to complete certain actions (e.g., attend 3 classes) in order to earn stamps and rewards.
Cognitive Engagement refers to how learners are interacting with the content of lessons as well as building their own autonomy for learning. IMMERSE’s lessons have been designed to encourage optimal cognitive engagement through the use of micro learning practices that focus on smaller chunks of language and allow learners to practice these chunks before moving on to new concepts. In addition, content in lessons is scaffolded, progressing from easier to more challenging activities. Furthermore, learning in IMMERSE is not confined to lessons. Learners can also engage with content outside of class by practicing speaking with AI-avatars or playing vocabulary-building games.
Finally, Socio-Emotional Engagement encompasses the affective factors of engagement, such as enjoyment, support, belonging and attitudes towards teachers, coworkers, and learning. Socio-emotional engagement is about building learners’ comfort with taking risks, building their enjoyment of the learning process, and facilitating social connections. At IMMERSE, we support socio-emotional engagement through the use of avatars which lowers learners’ affective filters, by building a community of learners that support each other during the learning process, and through the use of gamification and badges.
TPACK Framework
TPACK is a framework that helps course designers and lesson creators transfer their knowledge of pedagogical practice and content into technology-enhanced learning experiences.
Guided by the TPACK principles, our Education team draws from the variety of tools and resources available in the IMMERSE platform, their extensive knowledge of second language acquisition pedagogy, and relevant pedagogical approaches to create powerful and engaging learning experiences for our language students.
The TPACK approach creates unique advantages for the workforce. Imagine you are a sales representative for medical devices and you need to negotiate a deal with potential clients. You register for a class on negotiating in a doctor’s office. Once you join the lesson, you are placed in that environment, guided through micro lessons on key vocabulary and phrases that allow you to pitch to a fellow learner, who is playing the role of your potential client. By the end of the lesson, you have not only been able to practice that language, but because of the affordances within the environment you have acquired the language; making it part of your everyday life. Now, you have gained the confidence needed alongside the language skills to successfully make that pitch.
In a world where “knowing a language” means far more than the ability to complete grammar and vocabulary exercises, IMMERSE offers real language training that works. Our program is designed specifically to turn language learners into self-assured, fluent speakers with the skills and confidence they need to communicate effectively in any situation. For more information about how IMMERSE can work with your organization to achieve real language training results, try IMMERSE classes and other learning features with a free trial.
