A User-Friendly Interface for an Educational Travel English Game Supported with Virtual Reality

Introduction

Virtual reality technology, depending on its development, has been used in many fields over the years. One of these fields is education. Although the technologies used in education vary widely, virtual reality proves that it offers the ideal technological environment for education in many aspects. Even though various technologies allow people to learn and practice with visual and audio elements in education, they fail to keep up with virtual reality in terms of experience.

Virtual reality applications offer users a sense of presence in a virtual environment. In this way, users can be under circumstances where their presence is not likely, and they can experience applications such as surgical operations and flight training where practicing in the real world is dangerous for both themselves and others (Freina & Ott, 2015). Additionally, using virtual reality simulations in instructions, such as military operations and emergency aid increases the experience while reducing stress.

Virtual reality technology is also applied in foreign language teaching as well as in many fields of education. The opportunity to experience allowed by virtual reality in education helps users improve their speaking skills in particular. (Jensen & Konradsen, 2018). Besides, thanks to the wide variety of purpose-oriented virtual worlds, it is noticed that it can be useful in English language teaching, especially for specific objectives.

It is very important to develop a user-friendly virtual reality application to teach a foreign language to students based on experience. In order to achieve this, user experience is measured with quantitative and qualitative methods. Dinis et al. (2017) experienced three different cases in the virtual reality environment with the participants they selected from different ages and academic backgrounds. They obtained findings about the effectiveness and deficiencies of the developed environment by applying a questionnaire about their experiences. Baceviciute et al. (2022), in their study, examined virtual reality interfaces, which have written, auditory, and redundancy representation formats including both, with eye tracking method in terms of cognitive load. Depending on the purpose, there are studies in the literature in which different methods are used for the development of user-friendly interfaces for educational virtual reality applications (Suh & Prophet, 2018). However, studies in which both subjective experiential interview data and objective eye tracking data are used together and associated with each other are still open to development. This study focuses on this issue.

Within the extent of this research, to teach travel English, the airport module, which is the first module of the virtual reality application consisting of the traveling processes, was designed to be tested on Oculus Go virtual reality glasses. The designed application was put into a usability test with the eye-tracking technique with the participation of eight pre-service teachers who are currently studying at Istanbul University - Cerrahpasa, Hasan Ali Yucel Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Program. The students' comments were taken simultaneously . The module was updated to create the ideal education interface by analyzing heat maps and student comments taken from eye-tracking records. The edited module was programmed for Oculus Go and moved into the virtual reality environment. In this study, it is aimed to develop a virtual reality application that has the right interface, allows experiencing the travel process to practice travel English in foreign language teaching, and improves speaking skills in this process. For this purpose, answers to the following questions are sought:

• 1.

  What are the participants' opinions about the virtual reality application developed for travel English in foreign language learning?

• 2.

  What are the areas that participants focus on the application screen?

• 3.

  What is the heatmap of the participants like in the application?

• 4.

  How does the interface of the developed application affect the sense of immersion and presence?