THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

The learning experience that I design for this project is a series of English lessons where virtual tours are employed. These lessons target adult learners who are second year students in Hanoi, Vietnam. I plan to pilot these lessons, specifically, with students at University of Languages and International Studies - Vietnam National University. These students’s language command ranges from B2-C1 CEFR and learn English language as their foundation courses during their first year at the university, before they could claim their major in the later years.

A goal of this series of lessons is for these learners, most of whom spend their whole lives in Vietnam and have very little to zero exposure to places outside of their country, especially famous places and landscape in countries where English is the major language, to take a virtual tour to such places and get engaged in a number of English language practicing activities. These activities will be designed using authentic materials such as information from real websites, street signs, or restaurant menus.

In the lesson that I submit as a prototype for this project, I designed a lesson around a virtual tour to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, one of the unique museums I have had the chance to visit and believe my student would also find interesting to visit. In the beginning part of the lesson, students will be reading and listening about Isabella Stewart Gardner, the owner of the museum. The listening material was taken from the website of the museum itself so that the authenticity of the museum tour is boosted even more. After that, the tour will be divided into two major parts: the first one is more scaffolded while the later one is more free. In the scaffolded tour, students will be instructed to go to the Dutch room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum on the second floor. There they will first practice listening skill: they will have to find themselves in the right places instructed by a listening passage (which is also a part of the guided tour provided by the museum). For example, the guided tour says that the visitors should first stand near the long tables, so students will need to catch this clue in order to locate themselves correctly. Then the guide says that from these long tables, visitors can see a wall with two frames without any paintings. Only by paying attention to this guidance can students turn to the right direction. After this listening activity, students will do a pair-share activity in which they go to a specific painting in this Dutch room (assigned by the teacher) and do the thinking routine: see - think - wonder. They then would go to a partner to share about the painting that they have just looked at. Each of them would then go to the painting described by their partner, do the same thinking routine, and then go back to share their opinion. Following that, students will do a writing exercise: writing a journal entry to share their thoughts and understanding of the painting that they have looked at and talked about. It should be noted that important vocabulary items are taught in all of these activities. In the second half of the tour, students will form a team of 4 and then can freely choose a place in the museum to visit such as the signature courtyard, the yellow room, blue room, or Chinese loggia. It would be ideal for each team to visit one different place in the museum. Each team of students will then need to create a product to introduce to the rest of the class about the room of the museum that they have visited. For example, they can create a blog post, do a video recording themselves introducing the room, make a slide show, or anything they could think of to creatively report on their experience. In the next class, they will display their products to the whole class.

The other lessons will take students to a place on the Freedom trail, Harvard campus, a restaurant, or a historic park. In each lesson, students will have chance to practice their four macro skills: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Both individual and group work will be included and vary across lessons. For example, in unit 1, students work individually in their writing assignments but work in groups in their speaking activities and the researching phase before they “visit” the restaurants. Due to the limited space of this paper, I would not describe in further details about the next lessons, but they would follow the same pattern of integrating different skills like pilot lesson.

Formative assessments will be used for these lessons. The assessments might include a portfolio that displays students’ take-aways and reflections of their visit as well as a presentation/ product students make about the picture they have gathered about Boston and Cambridge in the United States.

context

The design of this series of lessons aim to address the following problems in the Vietnamese context:

An inappropriate focus on grammar instead of communicating skills: In Vietnam, most of the K-12 curriculum on English language almost solely teach grammar and vocabulary without giving students chance to practice English in meaningful communicational settings.
A lack of authentic contexts: Most students do not have chance to ever see a real restaurant or museum in an English-speaking country, for example. This will help make up for that experience and give learners an opportunities to have more confidence if they will ever have chance to go to these places in reality in the future. This also speaks to my very personal experience: if I did not do my master’s degree at Harvard, possibly I would never imagine there could be such an amazing and unique museum as Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. I hope the learning experience I design will help make the authentic experience that I am given to somebody else.
A lack of technological application in a language classroom: We mostly see the presence of technology in STEM courses, but not language classes in Vietnam. I anticipate this might give students a new kind of experience in their language learning journey.

DESIGN METHODS

I started by some casual chats with my former students who were curious about my study in the U.S. They all expressed that they would like to see more photos and sharing about my journey at Harvard and my time in the U.S. Although I did not intend to carry out any need analysis in the beginning, I believe those casual chats did give me a chance to empathize with my students who have never had a chance to go to the U.S in general and Harvard/Cambridge/Boston in particular. I came to realize that there was a desire among my students to see more and gain more experience of the places I am now living in. In other words, after empathizing/ talking with my students, I could define a need they have about visiting and acquiring authentic experience about places they have never been to. Then I came up with different ideas of helping them gain those experiences. Several ideas popped up: 1) to video tape my walk through places I like in Boston/Cambridge and design a curriculum around those walks, 2) design lessons using videos available on youtube or other websites, 3) design lessons based on websites of some famous places, 4) design a virtual tour by myself and create lessons around that tour, and 5) design lessons around the virtual tours I can find ready made. After considering different options, I ended up with the last option because I believe that a ready-made virtual tour will allow more freedom for the learners than a video while at the same time I can design something within the amount of time I have and with the technologies I am comfortable with at the moment. Designing something by myself from scratch now might not be a feasible idea. Also, as I considered your comments on 360 degree videos, I realized that the original idea about using VR was not the only way to take students on virtual tours. Instead of focusing on just one technology, I would instead use different technologies but focus on the idea of virtual tours. As the students are living so far away from the my current place, it was also not ideal to carry out my original idea of giving them VR goggles. Then I created one lesson after doing some research on similar products such as Google Expedition and Google Arts and Culture. After having the first prototype that I submit as part of this assignment, I tested it with three of my former students and invited them to a casual talk on zoom to get their perspective. I could say that although the intention of a design thinking process was not formed in the beginning, I believe it was the approach that I did follow for my design.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The design of these learning module is informed by some motivational theories and tries to tap into different dimensions of motivation.

Firstly, the design of these English language lessons could be analyzed under the theory about intrinsic motivation, which, according to Ryan and Deci (2000), refers doing an activity for the enjoyment of the activity itself and not for its instrumental values. Lepper and Henderlong (2000) mentioned four major types of intrinsic motivation, including challenge, curiosity, control and context. According to these authors, one source of motivation comes from people can derive a great deal of pleasure from overcoming new challenges. People can also seek motivation from something that can trigger their curiosity and their inherent need to make sense of the world around them. Furthermore, a sense of control and the contextualization of learning are both critical for people to experience intrinsic motivation in learning. I believe that the learning experience that I am trying to design can tap into these aspects of intrinsic motivation. First, as learners have to take part in a number of activities that involve some level of unpredictability and maybe a complex use of English in real life, they may find this a challenge. For example, listening to a real museum guide instead of listening to a recording that has been adapted to foreign learners might be challenging to many learners in Vietnam, who are mainly exposed to materials adapted for their course books only. Second, as most of the learners have never been to the places introduced in the course, this whole new world will definitely trigger their curiosity and in turn give them the motivation to carry on with the learning experience. Third, learners can enjoy a great deal of freedom in making their choices of how to navigate the tours, which aspect of the place they want to focus on, or dividing work among team members. Therefore, they will have a very strong sense of self-control and authority over their own learning. According to Grotzer (2022), this sense of control is developmentally necessary for adult learners, to whom the opportunity to take charge of their own learning is very critical. Finally and most importantly, this series of lessons expect to place learning in a meaningful and exciting contexts where English is used in authentic situations. As learners can make a lot of choices for themselves, such as choosing what to look at, where to go, and what research should be done, the learning experience can be individualized and tailored to their own interests. This, in turn, makes learning more meaningful to each student.

Second, different levels of scaffolding will be utilized throughout the project, based on the zone of proximal development theory by Lev Vygotsky. According to this theory, the most motivating learning experience will take place if learners receive proper support to go between what they can do unaided and what they cannot do by themselves. In this case, the learning experience is not going to be too structured and not telling exactly what to look at. However, there will still be a certain level of instruction and scaffolding appropriately given to individualized learners so that learning will be adaptive to their existing knowledge. I am considering integrating a mini project in some of the lessons, so how much of scaffolding and how to individualize and adapt the scaffolding can become an important question to ponder. I find Seyedahmad Rahimi’s presentation on how Physics Playground also based on this motivation theory for its design very relevant. Instructions and guidance can effectively support learning when they are given to students at the level where their learning takes place at its edge.

Finally, as learners get more exposure to the authentic contexts, they might also have the opportunity to increase their self-efficacy in understanding, communicating and expressing themselves in English. Due to cultural aspects that value humility and the long-held negative bias towards the inauthenticity of English language teaching and learning in Vietnam, students generally do not perceive that their English command is adequate. This exposure to the real contexts hopefully can help them improve their belief in their capability of understanding and communicating in English. Furthermore, guidelines and peer feedback would emphasize how students should give comments on their friends’ work. For example, “fast-food” comments on how smart or how good their friends are should be avoided. Instead, students need to be detailed about the process and efforts that their friends invest in the learning experience and the projects. This will align with Dweck (2002)’s suggestions on the impact of message/comments on students’ beliefs and motivation in learning.

Literature review

Although a number of research have been done on the application of virtual reality solutions in education in general and language education in particular, research on virtual tours/ virtual field trips remains quite limited to some certain domains and displays mixed results. Specifically, most of the research on the effects of virtual field trips and virtual tours on learning and teaching has been so far done in the field of science education. For example, there have been quite a few studies on the use of the virtual field trips in hospital education or geological education.

Among the limited research done on the use of virtual field trips/ tours in language education is a recent study by Cecco and Fata (2021). This study reports on the result of an action research done by the authors during the pandemic year when their students, who are learning to become interpreters in the future, could not access the real site of a North Eastern medieval site in Italy - Padua- to do the formerly in-person field trip. In this project, “the students shared the tasks and allocated the different roles: terminologists who were in charge of finding the correct English and German equivalents for specialised terminology, guides who prepared the itinerary in Italian, interpreters who prepared and studied for the interpretation into English or German on the day of the tour, photographers and media managers who were in charge of the photo-shooting, graphics and visuals during the Zoom meeting, editors for the PBworks space, a coordinator for every role-group, and the audience” (Cecco & Fata, 2021, p.1). After carrying out the intervention, the two authors delivered a questionnaire to 55 students, but only 23 of them returned their feedback in which students expressed very positive comments on how the virtual field trip could enhance their team-working skills. Regarding language skills, although significant learning was recorded in terms of English terminology, other areas such as grammar and pronunciation were perceived as less effective. It should be noted that this study was done on a student-led activity in which students had a lot of freedom and control over the learning activities while the instructors “only served as a procedural guide and content resource” (Knowles, 1988, as cited by Cecco & Fata, 2021).

Cheng (2021) also conducted a research on teachers’ perceptions of exploiting immersive virtual field trips for learning in primary education. Unlike the adult learners in Cecco and Fata (2021)’s study, the learners in this study by Cheng were primary students. According to the author, with a synchronous Wi-Fi connection, the instructor plays the role of “tour guide” by using a mobile device (e.g., a tablet PC) to broadcast the collection of 360° panoramic images to his/her students’ mobile phones. The students can observe the virtual content through the screen of their mobile phones with its installation in front of VR headsets such as Cardboard. The study reported some challenges carrying out this intervention by teachers who encountered problems with the installation of hardware and network and language affordances. The lack of interactive functionality was also reported as a setback of the learning experience, which resulted in students’ not wanting to continue with future virtual field trips. The study closed by emphasizing the role of instructional scaffolding and localized contents to improve the quality of the intervention.

These findings, to some extent, do not align with advice, teaching tips, and strategies commonly provided about the use of virtual field trips/ virtual tours in teaching and learning in general and language teaching and learning in particular. In general, advocates of this type of experience point out a number of benefits of getting students to go on a virtual tours. The often emphasized advantages of this learning experience include the advantages of contextual multimedia in facilitating learning, the extension of contextual learning environment beyond borders, and the increase in learners’ motivation to learn thanks to the high level of curiosity triggered by getting immersed in the contextualized learning environment.

As studies by Cecco & Fata (2021) and Cheng (2021) are not exactly what I am going to do in my project, I would like to carry out this intervention to see whether it resonates the results by those authors or leans towards to benefits put forward by the advocates. Specifically, my project will not be a completely student-lead virtual tour as in Cecco and Fata (2021)’s study, will not be done with primary students as in Cheng (2021), and will focus mainly on English language learning instead of trying to teach other professional skills as in Cecco & Fata’s or native Chinese language as in Cheng’s. Furthermore, my project is an attempt to seek an alternative to physical field trips/ tours for students who will not have access to those trips in real life, unlike the two aforementioned studies which seeked an alternative to real field trips for students who used to have access to those trips. I believe this major difference would also constitute a major difference in evaluating the results of my project.

Critique

On the one hand, I think there are some positive points about the project. First, last-minute adjustments to the project (designing language lessons using virtual tours in stead of relying completely on VR solutions) make the learning experience more accessible and more feasible in my and my students’ circumstance. The streetview and 360 virtual experience still could give students a sense of going to the real places on their regular devices. Second, students are motivated to learn as they are exposed to a real place, real stories, and authentic learning materials. Their learning becomes meaningful because they know the type of language used in the lesson comes from real life. Their curiosity to explore an interesting place was also triggered. Third, the lesson offered chance to practice multiple skills, including both language skills and other skills such as creative thinking, team working, and interpersonal skills. Learning materials also focus on multiple aspects of the learning environment instead of putting an overly heavy focus on any one particular aspect. I hope this is a positive difference from Google Arts and Culture’s lesson plans which often focus merely on multiple artworks.

On the other hand, I believe there are some aspects to improve about the project. First, with more investment in the intervention, both in terms of finance and time, I believe that the learning experience could be much better with a head-mounted VR solution. That way, students can feel that the experience is not only more immersive but also interactive and engaging. For now, I wonder if the students were engaged because of the interesting stories about Isabella and her museum or because of the learning activities and learning technology. Second, I think more freedom given to the learners might be a good idea. A major project-based learning experience might help them explore the place by themselves, make a portfolio to record language items that they learn, and have the chance to tutor/present what they know to the rest of the class. This way, I think the lesson will be able to balance out between the amount of information each visited place has to offer and the amount of information students can take in. If the students have the time to do research by themselves and focus on what they love exploring, there might be less concern about the cognitive overload and lengthy lessons.