This study aimed at enhancing the Mandarin essay writing by learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in Singapore by using authentic contexts in Second Life (SL). The participants were students in two classes of eighth graders from a junior high school in Singapore, and the study lasted for 5 weeks. A quasiexperimental design was adopted by…

This study explores the effects of how collaborating in a virtual world (VW) enhanced learners' healthcare professional-patient communicative skills, including physician-patient and inter-professional communication in medical discourse. Through a quasi-experimental design case study, 47 Taiwanese Freshman English students from a College of…

This study aimed to understand how children collaborated to create their own stories in a 3D virtual reality (VR) environment and to explore whether there were any gender-related differences in this learning setting. A total of 65 students (38 females and 27 males) of grades 4-5 participated in this study. A qualitative methodology was adopted in…

This study aims to investigate the influence of story creation on young EFL learners' reading performance. Action research was adopted to examine the effects of two different story reading projects in a library setting in Taiwan. Each project comprised a group of 19 young EFL learner from Grades 4 to 6 (aged 10-12). The first group's activities…

The importance of learner autonomy has been researched for at least two decades. However, it has been critiqued that most research mainly focused on theoretical explanations and was based on anecdotal evidence (Dalgarno and Lee in "Br J Educ Technol "41(1):10-32, 2010; Hew and Brush in "Educ Technol Res Dev" 55(3):223-252,…

This study investigated the research trends in language learning in a virtual reality environment by conducting a content analysis of findings published in the literature from 2004 to 2013 in four top ranked computer-assisted language learning journals: "Language Learning & Technology," "CALICO Journal," "Computer…