Inter-relationship between learning contexts
Learning context is seen by some as having an important impact on language learning and acquisition. For our non-background Chinese language and culture students there have been two main learning contexts available over the years: learning under the rubric of a formal undergraduate curriculum which is classroom-based and textbook driven, and undertaking short or long-term study, work or travel in China. Each of these learning contexts has its strengths and weaknesses.
So, where do virtual worlds fit into this picture? Can they, as we envisage, play an important role in supplementing, drawing from and ‘synthesizing’ the other two conventional learning contexts, providing a new learning context that combines the strengths of the other two and offer students new learning and acquisition opportunities?
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Virtual Worlds and Traditional Curriculum
So, how does language and culture learning in a virtual world like Second Life fit in with the traditional curriculum? Please see the diagram below for our vision of how Second Life fits into our classroom-based Chinese language and culture curriculum.
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Learning environments – classroom, real world, virtual worlds
Foreign language learning, learning context & memory.
The following diagram displays an attempt to look at the learning environment of the formal, classroom-based, teacher-centred tertiary learning context and the student-oriented, task-based virtual world learning context from the perspective of general education theory, SLA (second language acquisition) theory, and neuro-biological theory (a simplified version focused on elaborate encoding, automatic encoding, and effortful encoding).
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