This document discusses achieving a balance between traditional and innovative approaches to language teaching and learning in virtual worlds. It notes that both students and teachers bring established beliefs from traditional settings that can hinder taking full advantage of new technologies if not addressed. To achieve balance, the document recommends making language learning objectives explicit, training both students and teachers for the new environment, considering students' beliefs, revisiting teachers' own beliefs, fully utilizing the features of virtual worlds, engaging students actively, and providing informative feedback including exploiting the gaming aspects of such platforms.

1. ACHIEVING THE YING-YANG IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING IN VIRTUAL WORLDS Cristina Palomeque Joan-Tom às Pujolà 43rd ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL IATEFL CONFERENCE CARDIFF 31ST MARCH - 4TH APRIL 2009

2. contents Context & Beliefs Students’ & Teachers’ backpacks Digital Student & digital teacher MUVEs as VLEs Language teaching in SL Simulations

3. context

4. not a videogame serious game

5. SL - as a VLE Social dimension Interaction: environment, objects, avatars Sense of presence Multimodal communication

6. “ psychologically held understandings, premises, or prepositions about the world that are felt to be true” Richardson 1996 beliefs

7. sts’ backpack: beliefs Beliefs may have a profound influence on learning behavior. (Cotterall, 1995) Learners ’ belief systems cover a wide range of issues and can influence learners ’ motivation to learn, their expectations about language learning, their perceptions about what is easy or difficult about language, as well as the kind of learning strategies they favor. ( Richards & Lockhart, 1996:52 )

9. sts’ comments

10. T’s backpack: beliefs Teachers’ deep-rooted beliefs about how language are learned will prevade their classroom actions more than a particular methodology they are told to adopt or coursebook they follow. (Williams & Burden, 1997)

11. T’s comments What I find most challenging about SL is that I don’t know how sts feel about the tasks. I cannot ‘read’ their faces. We had a lot of fun in class because sts were very engaged in the task and afterwards we had a very interesting discussion about their learning preferences. Today I could have used the SL environment more. I would not have liked to use it as if it were Skype because SL offers much more.

12. Digital Teacher Digital Student

15. Type of Ts & Sts in SL

16. language te aching in SL Course: - integrative skills - experiential learning - situational - virtual immersion

18. simulations Objectives - not explicit enough? Learner/teacher training for language learning in a MUVE

19. Simulations in the FL class situational PBL / CLIL / learning by doing cognitive challenge not a role-play different type of assessment

20. Traditional simulation structure

21. Adapting traditional simulations to language learning in MUVEs briefing simulation debriefing informative feedback explicit language objectives enabling tasks

23. Cristina Palomeque [email_address] Joan-Tomàs Pujolà [email_address]