The Future of Education

Edition 14

Accepted Abstracts

Developing an Online ICT Study Abroad Course with the Integration of VR English Lessons

Yukie Saito, Chuo University (Japan)

Abstract

Due to the spread of Covid-19, implementing study abroad programs has been challenging for the past two years. The presenter coordinates study abroad courses in a private university in Japan and implemented one online study abroad course, an online ICT study abroad course. The course included a pre-program with pre-lectures from businesspeople of IT companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) in Japan and VR English lessons focusing on discussion, debate, and presentation. The main two-week online study abroad program offered by a university in San Fransico in the U.S. consisted of lectures from businesspeople of IT companies such as Netflix and ZOOM as well as GAFAM and business English classes focusing on discussion, debate, and presentation. The course’s objectives were to provide students with the opportunity to understand Information and Communication Technology and develop International Communicative Competence to be globally active participants in the future. The VR English lessons as a part of the pre-program were integrated to help them improve students’ business communication skills and understand the latest ICT. Benefits of VR for English education such as increasing engagement (Hu-Au & Lee, 2017), reducing affective filter (Schwienhorst, 2020) and public speaking anxiety (Godefridi et al., 2021), and raising students’ motivation (Tai, Chen, & Todd, 2020) are reported. Thus, introducing VR English lessons before the two-week online study abroad program may help students reduce affective filter and speaking anxiety. In this presentation, I will explain the background, the development, and the contents of the program. In addition, I will share the results of pre-and post-speaking tests, pre-and post-questionnaire surveys about public speaking before and after the course, and a questionnaire survey after the course to investigate the students’ perception about whether the objectives of the program to understand Information and Communication Technology and to develop International Communicative and Competence was attained.

 

Keywords: online study abroad program, ICT, Virtual Reality, business English skills

References

Godefridi, I., Suñer, F., Leblanc, C., & Meunier, F. (2021). Using virtual reality and peer feedback to reduce L2 speaking anxiety: an exploratory study. In N. Zoghlami, C. Brudermann, C. Sarré, M. Grosbois, L. Bradley, & S.Thouësny (Eds), CALL and professionalisation: short papers from EUROCALL 2021.100-105.

Hu-Au, E., & Lee, J. (2017). Virtual reality in education: a tool for learning in the experience age. International Journal of Innovation in Education, 4(4). 215-226.

Schwienhorst, K.(2002). The state of VR: A meta-analysis of virtual reality tools in second language acquisition. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 15(3), 221-239.

Tai, T., Chen, H. H., & Todd, G. (2020). The impact of a virtual reality app on adolescent EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 1-26.

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