Virtual Reality world used to teach language

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By Ryan Burns

If you’re trying to learn a new language and nothing seems to work, many people will suggest the full-immersion treatment. That way, there is no choice but to learn the language. If you’re looking to try the method without moving to a foreign country, the answer may be just around the bend.

Miguel Garcia-Ruiz, Arthur Edwards and Raul Aquino-Santos, professors of the College of Telematics at the University of Colima, Mexico, have joined forces with Professor Samir El-Seoud of the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman, Jordan. Their collaborative effort has produced a virtual reality city aimed at teaching foreign languages.

The city, named Realtown, is programmed with stores, schools, pharmacies and pretty much anything else students would expect to find in a generic town.

“At present, users only navigate the streets to get from one place to another, as the objective of Realtown is to provide listening comprehension practice and a collaborative platform where users can ‘negotiate meaning.’ In the future, users will be able to enter any of the 40 buildings and interact with intelligent agents, which will provide greater opportunities to actually produce language.”

Realtown was created using the open source software Distributed Interactive Virtual Environments, DIVE for short. DIVE, which was developed by the Swedish Institute for Computer Science in the 1990s, has been used at the University of Colima before, but then it was to teach medical students about certain injuries.

Realtown may have different goals, but it is handled in a similar way. Virtual reality is used to immerse the student in a situation conducive to learning. Students have video-game characters in Realtown, and can optionally make the experience feel more real with background noise such as traffic, sirens, children playing and other common sounds.

“What makes Realtown interesting is that students simultaneously perceive and interpret three different stimuli to help them incorporate their knowledge: visual, auditory and physical,” researchers say.

So far, Realtown has been used to teach English as a second language to engineering students in Mexico, and “the potential for the growth of Realtown is substantial,” researchers say.

Maybe one day soon, it will not be necessary to move to Spain to learn the native language, but until that day arrives, quizás usted deberías estudiar.

Originally Published: Issue 708 - October 15, 2008

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