Farmers’ Market English Experience

Abstract

We created a Virtual Reality “farmers’ market” lesson as a case study for teaching the use of thematic (in this case English) vocabulary in an interactive context following the Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) framework. 1 There are numerous definitions of what TBLT is, but a consistency across all is that this framework is student-centered, meaningful to everyday life, and has an outcome. Virtual Reality lends itself well to TBLT because students are able to use an infinite range of real-life contexts to support the way they develop their speaking and listening skills. As highlighted by Nunan, “target tasks refer to the uses of the language in the world beyond the classroom; pedagogical tasks are those that occur in the classroom.” 2 The objective for this VR task is to provide students with an opportunity individually, in a group of students, or with a teacher to work their way through a series of pre-tasks using typical food items in a farmer’s market, leading up to a final task itself where they are required - in either immersive or non-immersive virtual reality - to purchase items from a virtual market stall. Using the TBLT framework, we structured the lesson to answer our three major