Breaking Language Barriers with XR: Enhancing Foreign Language Education

Acquiring proficiency in a foreign language is essential for many individuals, offering significant advantages in the globalized economy. It enhances professional opportunities by facilitating communication with international clients and partners. Additionally, it broadens access to diverse sources of information, fosters connections across cultural boundaries, and provides deeper insights into various cultures and traditions.

Extended Reality (XR) encompasses immersive technologies that offer users access to realistic and fantastical virtual environments, presenting numerous advantages for educational purposes. XR experiences can fully immerse users by isolating them from their real surroundings (virtual reality) or overlaying real-time information onto their actual environment (augmented reality), delivering multisensory stimulation and facilitating social interactions at a distance. For foreign language learners, XR provides controlled and safe experiences with convenient accessibility.

Understanding how we can take advantage of the immersive potential of XR technology is essential. It is well-established that experiential learning enhances retention and understanding. As a learning tool, XR could immerse students in the culture and context of the languages they are studying. How would this affect motivation and engagement to learn a foreign language? How would vocabulary retention, grammar comprehension, listening and speaking skills be affected? Would XR be more effective as a didactic or autodidactic tool? How far into language proficiency levels would XR be effective?

It is also crucial to examine how practicing in XR within the contexts where students will apply their language skills can facilitate a smoother transition from traditional learning methods to real-world application. What specific variables could XR enhance to achieve this?

For XR to be effectively integrated into the classroom, teachers and educators must have access to suitable applications and learning content. Authoring tools are essential for the widespread adoption of XR in foreign language education, as they allow for the rapid creation of customizable learning experiences tailored to various languages, cultures, and individual needs. These tools would also assist developers in creating learning content for self-directed learning.

This Research Topic aims to explore XR's potential as a learning tool for foreign language education, whether through didactic or autodidactic methods. We seek to compare XR with traditional methods, identify which aspects of language learning it can most effectively enhance (e.g., attention, motivation, anxiety, vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, or others), and investigate the mechanisms (e.g., gamification, realism, interaction, social engagement, multisensory experiences, accessibility, or others) through which XR can optimize the learning experience.

Authoring tools are also critical for the effectiveness and adoption of XR in foreign language education. Therefore, their proposal, development, and validation are also essential to this Research Topic.

This Research Topic focuses on the following areas:

- Experimental studies on the application of XR in foreign language education.
- The proposal, development, and evaluation of authoring tools for foreign language education.