Designing and Evaluating a "Guided Social Immersion" Workshop in VRChat for L2 Speaking Practice

Abstract

Open social virtual reality platforms, such as VRChat,
provide immersive environments with high ecological
validity for second language (L2) speaking practice.
However, learners often face significant barriers in these
settings, particularly social anxiety and a lack of
pedagogical structure, which hinder effective engagement.
This study introduces "Guided Social Immersion" (GSI), an
intervention model co-designed with experts to establish a
dynamic balance between learner autonomy and instructional
scaffolding. Adopting an exploratory case study approach,
we investigated the impact of the GSI workshop on 12
Japanese learners' Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and
embodiment through mixed-methods data, including pre- and
post-test questionnaires and semi-structured interviews.
The results indicate that the GSI model significantly
enhanced learners' WTC. Furthermore, avatar-mediated
interaction effectively mitigated the fear of negative
evaluation, while a hierarchical task structure provided
robust scaffolding for meaningful linguistic output. This
research distills three educational design implications for
social VR environments, providing a valuable reference for
the practice of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
in virtual environment.