Extending the senses through virtual reality: Life-syllabus-based language education

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Planning for the success of students in the world is one of the priorities of teaching English in the secondary schools in Asia. The improvement of the English reader's skills to understand the actual needs defined as the +language by representing the events of the world in language learning milieu based on educational technology is in progress. Although extending the sense in the scenes of serious games is done for easy language learning, the active visual and verbal working memory of students has not been considered as an effective factor in reading. This study endeavored to investigate the allocation of sensory weight in virtual reality games for teaching English reading to Asian students with different working memory abilities.Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted by selecting 916 male and female students from secondary schools. Using parallel-group design, students participated in the working memory tests. These Iranian (N = 612) and non-Iranian (Pakistani, N = 204; Iraqi, N= 40, and Kashmiri, N = 64) were studying in the 10th grade of the second year of high school and were enrolled in language institute to learn English in the fall semester of academic year 2022-2023. In order to ensure homogeneity of the participants according to the level of English proficiency, a junior TOEFL test was administered, and students whose English proficiency score was between one standard deviation higher and one standard deviation lower than the mean were selected to take part in the study. The scores of the participants' working memory test were converted into standard scores with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. Based on the working memory capacity, the participants were placed in one of the active memory quadrants. Then, they were randomly divided into intact and experimental groups to learn English reading online or through virtual reality games in 14 sessions. In each session, first, the main researcher taught English reading passages to the participants using Skyroom educational software for 30 minutes. Then, online or virtual reality-based activities were provided to students to practice reading skills for 20 minutes. Participants were assessed formatively each session and a score of 0-20 was recorded for each student. The participants expressed their experience of the senses in the course of reading in each session verbally.Findings: The results of the analysis of repeated measures ANCOVA showed that extending the sense in teaching English readers through virtual reality games significantly facilitated students' learning. Adding auditory sense to scenes of virtual reality game significantly improved the reading progress of students who had high verbal working memory capacity. Although psychological and real-life categories were emphasized in the interviews, students with high working memory underlined the sense extension as useful for learning English reading in relation to the surrounding world.Conclusion The findings of this study revealed that extending the sense in virtual reality games is beneficial for learning English reading when it is in line with students' working memory. The correct allocation of the sense in the scenes of virtual reality games results in the use of English reading in the world, namely + language.

Keywords

• sense extension
• working memory
• english reading
• + language
• virtual reality