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The MOO is more than an online discussion space. It is also a place where students create and analyze their own target-language culture: they build rooms, represent their own (virtual) personality, and enact role plays. These activities are not just pretend exercises that students hand in and then forget, but instead become part of the environment that the students themselves construct and use for their language learning. They also become tools for analyzing the way language constructs culture and reality&emdash;virtual and otherwise. For instance, as part of a MOO unit devoted to the concept of space, students read short German-language texts in which space figures prominently, such as an excerpt from a story by Franz Kafka or a letter written by a German revolutionary in jail during World War I. After students discuss the linguistic constructions of space in these texts, they translate into practice their insights&emdash;in this case by creating their own spaces in the MOO. In addition to providing important language practice, such assignments primarily seek to foreground the students' own positionality vis-à-vis the cultural documents they are studying. Indeed, students begin to take their own work seriously by subjecting it to the same kind of analyses they practiced on the published texts by famous German authors. Visit some student rooms:
[Updated: 5 May 2001] |
