ChatGPT said: Becoming Multilingual Experts: Skilled Action in a Virtual Reality Language Learning Environment

• In Event: Embodied, Multiscalar, and Mediated Translanguaging Across Spaces, Identities, and Technologies

Abstract

This design-based study explores how multilingual learners engage in skilled multilingual action within a virtual reality (VR) environment designed to foster collaboration, environmental awareness, and language development. Using Human-Centered Multiscalar Analysis (HCMA), we examine how participants coordinate meaning-making through embodied interaction, digital tool use, and peer scaffolding. Findings show that learners drew on their full semiotic repertoires to co-construct solutions, reflect on roles, and navigate linguistic challenges across time and tasks. Through communicative projects, participants not only acquired language but also became socially and ecologically aware collaborators. The study advances a relational view of second language learning as becoming, where language is action, and learning unfolds through dialogical, distributed, and context-sensitive processes.

Authors

• Dongping Zheng, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

• Jin Dong, Princeton University