Foreign Language Instruction in a Virtual Environment: - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 310

them to model situations that are not other-
wise available. According to Schunk (2008),
role play beneficially stimulates students'
motivation as well as their attention. As a
result, students are more actively engaged
emotionally, which increases their learning.
Further, role playing is considered to be
helpful for learners in understanding “the
interplay of personalities and situations”
(Oblinger, 2004).
[Th4] Receptive Skills vs. Productive Skills . As
habitual residents of SL know, in order to
find an item in the inventory, it is necessary
to find the item by typing its name in the
inventory browser. Since the items were
named in German, the students needed to
type in the name of the item in the target
language. Because the exploration of the
fashion rooms was the first time that stu-
dents were exposed to the words, the new
vocabulary was still stored only in their
short-term memory. Making the students
type the words in the inventory browser in
German was intended to force the students
to retrieve the words from their short-time
memory and actively “use” them and there-
fore enhance the chances for the construction
of mental connections. Consequently, this
practice should have increased the chances
of moving the new vocabulary from short-
term memory to long-term memory.

Therefore, our playing of music was aimed at
enhancing the atmosphere. Moreover, since
the music we played came from German
culture (soundtrack from Run Lola Run ),
it provided additional connections with
cultural aspects.
[Th6] Self-monitoring. Keeping a record of one's
performance can have a beneficial impact
on the learners' perseverance in achieving
goals (Schunk, 2008).

Activity #2 : Aldi Store Shopping

Material practiced: vocabulary related to food
and drinks, grammatical gender, giving advice,
negotiation.

Description
Students were asked to teleport to an Aldi Store
[Th1] (see Figure 1). Next, they were asked to
explore the store, in which multiple displays of
food items were placed. Those food items were
correspondingly labeled in German as well as
color-coded according to their grammatical gen-
der [Th2].
After having explored the food items in the
store, the students were involved in a role-playing
[Th3] activity. Students were paired and given
roles. Student A was a salesperson, while student
B was a customer who was asking the salesperson
for assistance in choosing what food and drinks
to buy for a party that s/he was throwing. Based
on this scenario, the students were asked to create
conversations via IM using the new vocabulary
presented in the Aldi store [Th4].
During the creation of the conversations, the
students were encouraged to walk around the store
and interact with the items placed in it, as well
as to interact with their interlocutor [Th5][Th6].

Further, it is important to note that in language
learning, receptive language skills (recognizing
and understanding the words) develop before
productive skills (typing the words) as described
by Spolsky (1989). The way the inventory works
in SL serves as a useful way to help those produc-
tive skills develop.

[Th5] Ambiance . Creating a desirable ambiance
in the classroom, for example, by playing
music, may increase the chances for more
effective learning (Leung & Fung, 2005).

Advantages
The justification for the role-playing was to
encourage students to use the new vocabulary
explored in the Aldi store in a relevant context.