Making VR ordinary in ELT

• Hengzhi Hu ^[1]
  1. [1] National University of Malaysia

     National University of Malaysia

     Malasia

     
• Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 80, Nº 3, 2026, págs. 397-400
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • When I read Cowie and Alizadeh’s (2026) overview of virtual reality (VR) for language learning, I recognised the tone I trust most in technology writing for English language teaching (ELT): pragmatic, classroom-first, and suspicious of spectacle. They do not promise that head-mounted displays will revolutionise language teaching. Instead, they map a spectrum of options, ranging from headset-based immersion to simple, browser-based rooms, and argue that teachers should choose by pedagogic fit rather than by novelty. That framing matches how I now approach VR in ELT: I start with a language aim I already care about, and only then decide whether a low-immersion space can help me run a routine more effectively.

    I came to this after a few false starts. My earliest attempts treated VR as a destination (see Lege 2020). I booked a lab, installed heavy clients, and shepherded students through log-ins and calibrations, only to discover that the activity I had planned, which was a polite complaint at a service counter, could have been done faster, and with more talk time, in a single browser scene, or even a one-to-one student activity in class. Since then I have adopted a simple rule in ELT classes: one link, one scene, one communicative function. The fewer teleports and account creations, the more minutes my students spend producing language rather than troubleshooting.