A CALL for evolving teacher education through 3D microteaching

Abstract

This paper describes micro-teaching delivery in virtual worlds. Emphasis is placed on examining the effectiveness of Singularity Viewer, an Internet-based Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) as the tool used for assessment of the student teacher performance. The overall goal of this endeavour lies in exploiting the opportunities derived from such an immersive environment in order to provide better distance education. To this end, a total of eight language teacher practitioners from different parts of the world took part in this study and engaged in peermicroteaching as part of their Master of Arts (MA) in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programme. Data acquisition involved screen recordings of the peer microteaching sessions, statements in participants’ reflective journals and both debriefings and written communication within the virtual world. Our results indicated the positive potential of using MUVE platforms as instruments in the assessment of student teacher performance.