Someday I want to go to the Guggenheim! A case study about adolescent learners’ foreign language enjoyment in a desktop virtual reality project

Abstract

The present instrumental case study explores the application of positive psychology in language education by investigating the ways in which two adolescent English as a foreign language learners engaged with a desktop virtual reality (VR) project. Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) represents a key positive emotion that enables students to persist at learning a foreign language, yet research about it is limited when it comes to the experiences of young learners in online settings. This study addresses this gap by offering a detailed examination of two adolescent English as a foreign language students from an online school in Japan who used Google Street View to craft and showcase desktop VR tours of personally relevant locations to each other, exploring to what extent this collaborative desktop VR project supports the learners' FLE. Given the overlap between the theoretical underpinnings of FLE (e.g., collaboration, creativity, authenticity) and the affordances of VR (e.g., creativity, interactivity, immersion), the research site was conceptualized as a rich space for examining FLE. Quantitative data include an FLE survey. Qualitative data include a co-constructed lesson plan, observations of state FLE episodes during desktop VR tours, and semi-structured interviews. Survey results indicated that the participants had high level of FLE prior to the start of the present study. An analysis of the qualitative data sources revealed that learners' state FLE surfaced consistently, enabling them to tap into their stable trait-level FLE to persist and enjoy the project. This multi-method examination of young adolescent learners' FLE provides perspective into desktop VR's potential for facilitating personalized, creatively expressive, and supportive language learning experiences.