Blog #13 Second Life

I think of Second Life in the same way that I think about online chat. If you're teaching an EFL class, then it's a great way to get your students to interact with native English speakers. But, if you're in an ESL setting, then I think efforts are better spent getting the studnets to have real face to face interactions with native speakers, not computer interactions. Plus, I think it would be hard to monitor. It's my experience with Second Life that much time is spent walking around looking for others. This could be quite a waste of time for students. Even if they know where some native speaker are, what would prevent them from slacking off and going exploring. There is so much to look at in Second Life, students may easily be distracted. Overall, I think it would be fun to do one day just to give the students something different to work with. I wouldn't make it a regular part of my class though.

As far as the article we read on English video gaming. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I can see how it could help young students learn English because it would be using a medium they particularly enjoy. I'm not really comfortable with the idea of encouraging video gaming though. Plus, even if it helped them learn vocabulary and some syntacs structures, it really wouldn't help them with their communicative competency. It places them behind a barier of any true interaction. There would have to be a lot of research proving this to be very beneficial before I would ever jump on board.