> "It's just easier for children". Yes, in a round about way, it is easier, but those reasons are purely social. Given that some adults do demonstrate the capacity to achieve fluency, yet are not living anywhere near a completely, 100% immersed life like a child does, there is clearly some natural advantage that adults have that makes up for the lack of nurture.
I like this argument, it puts it very succinctly!
On a completely different note, seeing that you're developing VR applications for learning languages: How is that coming along? Is Diplomatic Language Services already using it in production? And what improvements in learning/teaching compared to non-VR applications (and non-VR private classes) have you seen? I mean, I generally understand the appeal of VR but I hadn't heard of it in the context of language learning yet, so I'm wondering what the advantages might be since it's a purely visual thing, so a priori not necessarily more conducive to teaching a language(?)
PS: Now that I've seen you mention your alma mater on your website: What a coincidence – I once went to Shippensburg for one of my boxing fights! :) What a beautiful place!
We're currently in trial phase, so we don't have a lot of results yet, but what we've built so far is based on existing research and the results we have seen are consistent with it. The research has shown significant results in various learning factors, primarily based in sensory engagement reinforcing neural pathways. I'm... not sure how much I can share about that research, as it was presented to us as proprietary information by a person we are hoping will be a research partner of ours in the near future. Though I will say, I'm quite proud of myself for having intuited most of the factors and built them into our design before we met them :)
The VR at the most basic level provides a context in which to learn the language. It's one thing to read a book about a place and learn the words associated with the people and culture of that place. It's another thing to stand in that place and see the thing you're talking about.
And we've all heard that full immersion is the "best" way to learn a language. But that's just not an obtainable goal for most people. As I said, most of our students are government employees. They work most of their time from the States or a US Military base. When they are put into a situation to use their language skills, it can often be at the last minute for a deployment of some kind. They're adults with careers, kids, houses, and not enough money to travel the world whenever they want. So the VR gets us closer on the "being there" scale than they'd get otherwise.
We're taking a different approach from our competitors in the market. There are a number of "VR" foreign language training apps that are basically just DuoLingo or Rosetta Stone in a 360 video (and in a few cases, we've seen people calling it VR even when there's no headset involved, sigh). You are meant to purchase a course that is solitaire and self-guided. They're all using speech recognition engines to judge pronunciation. That sounds like a great idea on the surface but turns out to be complete garbage in practice. Speech recognition engines only work about 95% of the time for fluent speakers, where the threshold for non-frustrating Human-Computer Interaction requires more like a 98% success rate. So you get into a problem of not knowing if the errors you detect are because the student isn't pronouncing the words correctly, or if the speech engine is not doing its job. Even worse, you get a lot of false positives as well, which gives students the illusion that they are progressing when they are not (I've actually done a fair amount of work with speech-oriented interfaces as well. My career has been... very broad).
In our case, we already have a successful business doing 1-on-1 language classes, so we've designed the application to fit into that. Also, I wanted to make sure that our instructor body didn't think we were trying to put them out of a job. Most of our students are in class for about 5 hours a day, two to three times a week, for about 3 months at a time. They spend that time 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 with a certified language instructor. Our VR app constitutes about 1 to 2 hours a week of that course, and it still involves your instructor. In this way, we avoid the pronunciation assessment issue that our competitors have entirely. But we are also providing a much more personalized experience for our students, as well.
We take imagery from Google StreetView, combine it with didactic content, and weave in narrative of taking a guided tour of the location with your instructor (I've even built a whole lesson editor that our curriculum developers are able to use on their own, so we're getting pretty fast at making new content, too). You discuss the place and maybe role-play a few interactions like renting a hotel room or buying food at a restaurant.
That's Phase 1. We are currently entering Phase 2, which involves different interaction metaphors and more interactive play for role-plays.
Even in traditional language instruction, there are concepts of "immersive" role-play, what are called "isoimmersions", which could be as complex as setting up a mock bank teller booth in a room or as simple as lining a bunch of chairs up and calling it a "bus". I see a lot of our product as taking that concept and making it not hokey. Cultural learning is also a big part of our training regimen, as it doesn't do a diplomat much good to learn Arabic without learning a specific region's dialect and culture.
In our own trials, we're seeing a very sizable increase in student engagement. The students are reporting and showing that they are more motivated to study. The instructors are also having fun with the project, which we think is significant. We have a pretty broad range of student level, but we're seeing improvement across the board. Even the seasoned students who are used to isoimmersions have discussed how the VR headset gives them a brand new perspective on the content.
Our team is basically me as head engineer, a junior developer, and a rotating roster of 3 language training specialists from whomever has time from fulfilling our regular work contracts.
As for Shippensburg... it's a nice place to visit. I don't miss it much. Gettysburg is a better town in that region.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed response! The approach of "traveling" to a foreign place using VR is a really cool idea I hadn't even thought of! Now I kinda wish your app were open-source (or available for a fee) and my online Spanish teacher could use it in his language class with me haha. :)
I like this argument, it puts it very succinctly!
On a completely different note, seeing that you're developing VR applications for learning languages: How is that coming along? Is Diplomatic Language Services already using it in production? And what improvements in learning/teaching compared to non-VR applications (and non-VR private classes) have you seen? I mean, I generally understand the appeal of VR but I hadn't heard of it in the context of language learning yet, so I'm wondering what the advantages might be since it's a purely visual thing, so a priori not necessarily more conducive to teaching a language(?)
PS: Now that I've seen you mention your alma mater on your website: What a coincidence – I once went to Shippensburg for one of my boxing fights! :) What a beautiful place!