ViTAAL and NIFLAR at Slanguages 2009 1

This is the abstract of my presentation at the Slanguages 2009 Conference:

• SL Name: Koen Antonioni
• Title of presentation: The Project ‘ViTAAL’ revisited: Evaluation & Follow up
• Type: presentation - discussion
  
  Abstract:
  In this session we would like to present the results of the evaluation research of the project ViTAAL. The project, introduced at SLanguages 2008, was an initiative of a partnership of a number of secondary schools and teacher education institutions, facilitated with a research grant by Kennisnet, the Dutch national Schoolnet. We will focus on the organisational set-up and the lessons learned in the 2008 pilots realised in Active Worlds:
  - 3D Language Village:
  A virtual version of a current, real-life assessment practice for lower secondary education in which student teachers help pupils through virtual role-play and coaching activities to prepare for and do oral proficiency, performance-oriented assessments.
  - the SurReal Quest ‘ Panique à Bord’.
  This LanguageQuest is situated on a 3D version of the Titanic and centres on a detective-like problem solving task, involving integrated training of language skills and triggering interviews with the avatars of the story characters.
  Finally we present the project´s further developments. In this context we would like to discuss the definition of and first ideas for the EU-project Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR, 2009-210). This project aims to develop a pedagogic framework for the design of tasks geared at optimally exploiting the specific affordances of 3D virtual worlds for the promotion of intercultural communicative competence.