Second Life (SL) is an online virtual world in three dimensions imagined and created by its users. An avatar is a SL user’s 3D graphic representation through which the SL user interacts with other people in SL or with users from across the world, including, educators, artists, business men, etc.
Second Life is a good social platform that offers its user:
Shared experiences. - Language exchange.
- A feeling of presence.
- Visual component.
- Visual and social cues.
- Closer to face to face conversations
- Real time collaboration.
- Immersion.
- Engagement.
Second Life allows you to travel through an entirely imaginary world with buildings, people, cafes, streets, mountains, etc. Second Life is mainly adopted for academic, social and business purposes and many educational institutions have begun to explore Second Life as a platform for education, standing out the ESL/EFT Instruction.
Many different languages are spoken in SL and there’re also places where these languages are taught. Second Life has also created a new space for virtual classrooms that act very much like 'real-life' classrooms. Students attend presentations, teachers help students to communicate, etc.
Second Life provides a large number of rich environments for learning and instruction. In terms of language learning, SL can provide a friendly, appealing, and contextually relevant space for native speakers of a target language to interact with language learners. This allows the language learners opportunities to interact with native speakers in realistic, authentic, and relevant settings such as offices, shops, athletic events, business meetings, and classrooms.
In SL, learners communicate through text messages, audio conversations, and their avatar’s non-verbal gestures.
There is a large number of companies, organisations or sites in Second Life that are teaching ESL, for example we find “The English Village”, “British Council Isle” “Ciudad Bonita” etc. All these locations are schools for learning and teaching a foreign language, and we can interact with students and teachers from different countries.
We can learn a foreign language in Second Life through these activities:
- Interpreting a Role playing.
- Being in a tour of any country and by this way we can know more about its culture.
- Practicing the target language skills and learning vocabulary by our own.
- Reflecting on the lived experiences during the course and sharing ideas with everyone.
- Conversations lessons.
- Discussions groups.
- Drama/theatre.
- Learning vocabulary trough the other branches of Knowledge like medicine, architecture, chemistry, etc.
- Writing blogs.
- And we can use SL in other too many different ways in order to practice and learn the target language.
In general, Second Life is an efficient tool that we can use in ESL/EFL teaching and learning because it offers a big amount of opportunities to exchange language skills with different people around the world in an interactive and rich environment.
My personal Experience:
I am a Second Life user. I registered a few days ago and I can tell for my experience that Second Life is a tool from which, we as students and futures teachers, can take advantages from it, and use them in order to have a better development in our language skills and our classroom.
A few days ago, I had the chance to interact with a person from Virginia, USA. We had a nice conversation and he told me about his life and what he’s doing. Also we talk about our countries and he told me a little bit about the American History.
I can tell for that, that SL is also an excellent instrument to Know more about the culture of any country, no matter if it is far or near from us, Second Life give us the chance to get to places that we could never imagine to be. I recommend all my classmates and friends to integrate Second Life into their lives because there is not limit to create whatever we want or to learn about a lot of things and it’s a very fun way to do it.
