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Foreign language (FL) textbooks often provide a static representation of culture without giving learners the opportunity to engage with different aspects of the foreign country (McConachy & Hata, 2013). Thompson (2013) claims that writing FL textbooks requires difficult choices about what cultures should be represented, hence the teaching of culture becomes a challenging endeavor. Fortunately, the advent of the Internet and the rapid advancement of technology has facilitated access to culturally authentic resources and educators now integrate technology in their lessons to support culture pedagogy. Much scholarship has been devoted to the impact of technology tools such as podcasts (e.g., Ducate & Lomicka, 2009), social networking sites (e.g., Barrot, 2016), and blogs (e.g., Pinkman, 2005), however to date little is known about the effect of highly immersive virtual reality (VR) on culture (Berti, 2019). Differently from low immersive VR environments (e.g., Second Life), highly immersive VR utilizes a head-mounted display (HMD) enabling a fully immersive and personalized learning experience (Schwienhorst, 2002). Highly immersive VR is learner-centered and learner-driven, unlike other traditional pedagogical materials, since users can move in any direction and focus on what catches their attention within the digital 360-degree environment.
Considering the important role of technology in the field of language education and the scarce attention to highly immersive VR, this study attempts to shed light on the use of this emerging technology by answering the following research questions:
- (1)
How does highly immersive VR impact FL learners’ understanding of environments and people of the studied foreign culture?
- (2)
What are FL learners’ attitudes and concerns toward the use of VR in the classroom setting?
This article is organized into four main sections. The first section provides background information on VR and immersion, cultural understanding, and experiential learning theory (ELT). Next, the methodology is described and followed by a discussion of the results. The last section addresses the limitations of the study and suggests that future research focuses on the potential of interactive highly immersive VR for language education.