A Boon to Second Life Language Schools

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When voice capabilities were announced in February, many Second Life users expressed dismay in blogs. They complained that listening to voices and having to talk would break the hermetic virtuality of the world, bringing with it unwanted aspects of the real world, such as users' real genders, identities, and nationalities. "Being forced to use a voice in a virtual world, something not of my choice, against my will--because people in business will all be forced to do this--feels like the ultimate blow," wrote Prokofy Neva, a Second Life user, in the Second Life Herald.

LanguageLab is not the first such school in Second Life: a variety of educators have offered English, Japanese, and Esperanto, among other languages, and in May the British Council is scheduled to open three English learning islands in the teen version of Second Life. But LanguageLab is the largest private language school venture and the first to be built around the integrated voice capabilities. It also worked with Second Life's VoIP provider, Massachusetts-based Vivox, before Second Life tapped Vivox to provide voice for the entire virtual world.

LanguageLab founder Kaskel says he hopes to offer classes in other languages, for which he will duplicate his basic island. Most of the current students in the beta have grasped Second Life quickly (students must pass a basic orientation before class begins), although only about 20 percent of them have operating systems and video cards that meet Second Life requirements.

Constructing virtual environments for language learning that either augment or replace classroom work has been a holy grail of foreign-language educators since the first digital "microworld" was developed 15 years ago. "The basic idea of getting individuals to interact in a microworld or simulation is extremely interesting, but it's hard to do," says Robert Fischer, a professor of French and linguistics at Texas State University and the executive director of the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. These digital environments are complex and expensive to build, particularly if the pedagogical model pairs students with a chatterbot or some other artificial conversation partner. Another barrier to student acceptance has been the fidelity of the virtual world. "Students are so used to playing, their expectations are extremely high, and when they don't see good graphics in the language learning environment, that could be a problem," Fischer says.

The world of Second Life is rendered with such detail that this won't likely be a problem. Teaching language in Second Life has an advantage over the other Internet-based methods, from blogs to podcasts to text chat, that have overwhelmed foreign-language teachers with teaching opportunities. It has what Graham Stanley, the project manager for the British Council's island in Second Life, calls "a sense of place." "This sense of place makes learning, and indeed socializing in a virtual world, a more 'human' experience than many other online environments," he says.