Blending a Three-Way Technology into A Language Acquisition and Development Course for Pre-service Teachers

Abstract

This article is to report an action research conducted in two sections of a course called Second Language Acquisitionand Development during the fall semester of 2011 and the spring semester of 2012. By focusing on a three-wayblended learning (BL) environment—face-to-face (F2F), eLearning, and Second Life (SL, a virtual-worldenvironment), this study attempts to explore students’ experiences, perceptions, and reflections on multimediatechnology and apply the findings to help improve a second language acquisition course. By conducting 36interviews totally from two semesters (15 from the first semester and 21 from the second semester) as well as 30course observations (20 F2F and 10 SL observations), the result of the study suggests students preferred thecombination of F2F and eLearning. The study concludes that SL application needs to be reevaluated for a better BLinstructional structure in terms of student’s skills, training, high-standard hardware equipment, and design of virtualinstallation in order to effectively integrate it into the course of Second Language Acquisition and Development.