This workshop aims at introducing ecological view towards language learning and using Virtual Reality games to immerse international students from China and domestic students who are learning Chinese in a rich multilingual and multimodal and fun environment to learn both Chinese language and culture and build a language learning community. Traditional language learning in classroom environments has been focusing on language forms, such as pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Learning on forms treats language as decodable components simply pied up, and ignores the environment in which language is used. In the ecological view of language learning, learners develop in their “skillful linguistic action” (Cowley, 2012, p. 13), their potential to detect different linguistic resources and their ability to act upon these as affordances (van Lier, 2002) and achieve value-realizing (van Lier, 2004). Also, language education should not only at a micro level. At a macro level, a language education curriculum should focus on providing students with various things which includes experiential, contextual, emergent, and activity-based quality driven experiences. Quality driven experiences are sources of human inspiration and aspiration, which should not be taken away. Two virtual reality games will be provided. One is a commercial game called “Keep talking, nobody explodes”. Another one is called Panda Village which is designed by Jin Dong with her colleagues at University of Hawaii at Manoa. In this game, participants from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds form teams to help solve problems encountered by the Giant Pandas and citizens in the Virtual Reality Village.
Meet the facilitator:
Jin Dong is a Lecturer at Princeton University from Fall 2022. She is also a Ph. D candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research interests include (trans)languaging, Distributed Language, virtual world/reality, and game-assisted language learning. She is part of the RIDLLE group (https://manoa.hawaii.edu/ridlle/) that designs distributed language learning environments.
What to Expect:
Single workshop (3 hours total)
To request accommodations for this event, please contact the workshop or event facilitator at least 3 working days prior to the event.
