The Effects of Applying Virtual Reality Implementation on Chinese Writing Skill of Description

This chapter reports on the integrations of Chinese, geography, and information technology courses, with teachers from each discipline collaborating to prepare their courses, as an example of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This empirical study employed mobile devices in the learning activities, used the situated learning strategy, and involved the students in real-life investigation in the interdisciplinary literacy curriculum. The students observed and learned in the real-life environment, and utilized mobile technologies to support their data collection and information searching. They made connections between the knowledge in the textbook and the real-life situation in the literacy-based learning activities. After they came back to the classroom, they used the data and photos they had collected to design the virtual reality of the environment they had visited in order to recall and reflect on the descriptive writing activity. This chapter primarily explored the learning effectiveness of Chinese, and found that the students made significant progress. The higher performance of the students’ VR creation, the better the outcome of their descriptive essays. It was confirmed that creating a VR project in the information technology course according to the resources collected from the actual investigation in the geography course played a role in deepening effective reflection in the pre-writing stage so that the students could perform better in the descriptive writing in the Chinese course.