The exploration of student teachers’ Use of VR to design learning tasks for English classes- students' perceptions and process

Abstract

Although immersive VR has become a trend, few studies investigate how teachers learn how to incorporate immersive VR into lesson planning. This four- week study explores how pre-service teachers learned to design English speaking lessons on immersive VR. A total of fifty preservice teachers from a northern university in Taiwan first learned how to use the VR headsets to do basic moves, and then they were grouped into six teams and prepared an English lesson plan by incorporating the Immerse VR app. They also video-taped two short clips, one of teachers’ account and the other one is the demonstration video from students’ using Immerse VR app. In the third week, they showed their lesson plan, demonstration videos and completed a survey, followed by the focus group interview in the fourth week. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed, including pre-service teachers’ surveys, demonstration videos, lesson plans and classroom observation data. The results show that pre-service teachers generally liked the use of immersive VR in planning English speaking lessons and found it useful and easy to design lessons on immersive VR platforms, although some difficulties, such as being unable to add new items and feeling nausea happened.

Keywords

immersive VR, EFL speaking lessons, situated learning