Online language courses often fall short in offering students enough chances to practice speaking
In recent years, many universities have begun offering fully online language courses. While these programs are convenient—allowing students from anywhere to participate from the comfort of their homes—they come with limitations. A significant drawback is the heavy reliance on asynchronous learning, where students complete exercises in online workbooks and textbooks. Although these tasks are useful for memorizing vocabulary and verb conjugations, they often fail to provide meaningful speaking and listening practice. As a result, even after finishing the course many students still struggle to communicate effectively in the language they’ve been studying.
To address this gap, universities are turning to innovative solutions to enhance speaking and listening practice in online language courses. One such approach is integrating immersive technologies that create interactive, engaging environments where students can practice real-life conversations outside of class time. By combining these tools with traditional coursework, language learners can develop their communicative abilities in a more dynamic way, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application.
This is where IMMERSE steps in, offering a powerful solution to boost language learning by providing students with the additional speaking practice that traditional online courses often lack.
How IMMERSE Partners with Universities
IMMERSE partners with universities to provide language learners unlimited access to features like instructor-led live classes, global community meetups, and AI-powered independent study activities.
Through these activities, students engage in real-time speaking practice, significantly improving their fluency. Here's how IMMERSE partnered with the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to elevate their first-semester Spanish students' speaking and conversational fluency.
IMMERSE and UIUC
The Spanish program at the University of Illinois was looking for a way to provide their first-semester Spanish students with more opportunities for speaking practice. As this course is traditionally taught online, students usually have only one hour a week together to practice speaking. As a result, the program found that by the end of the semester, many students had not developed the necessary speaking skills to confidently advance to the second-semester course.
To address this issue, the program explored out-of-class resources to improve oral communication practice and decided to partner with IMMERSE to offer their students additional speaking practice each week. During Fall semester of 2024, students spent a minimum of 2 hours per week taking instructor-led live lessons in IMMERSE and engaging with AI-powered conversation and pronunciation practice.
Around 60 students from four first-semester Spanish classes participated in this project and the department conducted an efficacy study to evaluate IMMERSE’s impact on their learning. Two of the four classes served as the “experimental group” and had two hours of their traditional asynchronous online homework replaced by two hours of IMMERSE. The other two classes (the control group) continued following the original Spanish 101 curriculum for this semester.
The Spanish program conducted pre- and post-tests to assess the impact of using IMMERSE not only on students’ speaking skills but also on their pronunciation accuracy, confidence, anxiety, motivation, and overall engagement. By using a control-experimental design, the Program Directors were able to see whether IMMERSE effectively enhanced their students' speaking proficiency. They were pleased with the results and decided to continue using IMMERSE in the Spring semester. Read below to learn about what they found:
Key Insights
- Foreign Language Anxiety: The control group experienced no change in anxiety levels (it actually increased by 1%), whereas students using IMMERSE reduced their anxiety by 6.16%.
- Motivation: Students using IMMERSE reported being 16.1% more motivated to learn Spanish than those in the control group by semester's end.
- Willingness to Communicate: IMMERSE students scored 17.6% higher on willingness to communicate compared to the control group.
- Oral Exam Performance: IMMERSE students outperformed the control group by 7.5% on their final oral exam.
- Self-Reported Proficiency: Using ACTFL Can-Do statements, students using IMMERSE reported greater proficiency gains across multiple levels (NL-IL) than the control group by the semester's end.
Learner Testimonials
Participants also highlighted many benefits of using IMMERSE in their end of semester interviews, specifically:
Students thought IMMERSE provided a social and interactive learning experience:
"I liked that it was very social, and there was a lot of interaction between other people."
"I liked being paired up with different people. That was helpful and made me more comfortable talking to people in Spanish."
Students really liked how IMMERSE’s guides come from a variety of Spanish-speaking backgrounds and said it helped their overall Spanish comprehension and pronunciation
"I did notice that each guide kind of has their own diverse background, so their pronunciation is not necessarily the same, which I genuinely liked."
"Having Guides who came from a variety of diverse backgrounds made the experience better. "
Students found IMMERSE classes to be particularly valuable for providing speaking practice, reducing anxiety, and fostering greater comfort and confidence in language use
"I feel like the classes do help build more confidence when you're speaking. I think it might be because it's guided and you can ask questions."
"I think that doing it in the virtual environment, even with classmates and other people, was a lot less anxiety inducing."
Students thought IMMERSE’s guided conversations and pronunciation practices prepared them well for class
- The activities were sometimes repetitive, but in a good way, because it helped me with pronunciation and forming sentences before I went into the live class.
- I feel like it helped me learn better and made me more engaged in class. I wasn't confused anymore. In class, I was actually participating because I knew some answers.
Students found IMMERSE to be user-friendly
"I had never messed with a virtual reality headset. Never touched one in my life, but it was actually really user friendly, and it wasn't hard to get the hang of."
"I was surprised at how easy it was to use."
Help your language learners improve their speaking skills with IMMERSE
Looking to enhance your university’s language programs with supplemental immersive training? IMMERSE’s flexible partnership program provides students with access to an interactive Learning Path, including unlimited AI-powered language practice.
Connect with our Growth team today to learn more!
