Integrating Google Street View into a three-dimensional virtual environment in which users control personal avatars provides these said users with access to an innovative, interactive, and real-world context for communication and culture learning. We have selected London, a city famous for its rich historical, architectural, and artistic heritage, as the location of choice for culture learning. Using avatars, learners walk the virtual streets of London under the guidance of a native English-speaking instructor, and interact with each other using text and voice chat functions. The study examines the effects of this virtual environment on culture learning. Specifically, a qualitative case study combined with a time-series design is used to investigate the virtual context's impact on culture learning in terms of learner knowledge and attitudes, and to track associated change processes across the three research phases (baseline, treatment, and maintenance). The results show that all four English learners involved in the study benefitted from their cultural immersion, to varying extents, in the virtual environment. Four contributing learner factors, namely linguistic proficiency, motivation, character traits, and attitudes were found to correspond to the learners' levels of acquaintance with the target culture.

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The latest street view technology enables language learners to look around and navigate interactively from remote worldwide locations via the internet. In addition to the enhanced feeling of immersion, the realistic scenes in a street view panorama help to represent the real world and make language learning more engaging and meaningful. This chapter explores the potential for extending a virtual English as a foreign language classroom with online street view panoramas. The program aims to create an immersive environment within which students complete a task-based learning activity; the task design is based on Schank's (1996) goal-based scenarios. The results reveal that street view technologies hold great potential to enhance language learners' communicative competence. Future research is needed to look into learners' experience in this new learning environment and to examine the use of street view panoramas in other disciplines.

This study incorporated Google Street View into a 3D virtual environment, known as VECAR, in which EFL learners controlled their avatars to learn vocabulary in a context of New York City. New York City's Times Square is full of real-life materials, realia, which can be used to assist situated incidental vocabulary learning and to connect vocabulary acquisition to the real world. The case study design combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis was used mainly to investigate the program's impact on vocabulary acquisition, and to track the ongoing dynamics of the vocabulary acquisition across the four research phases, learner motivation in terms of self-efficacy and attitudes toward vocabulary learning, and strategy use across learners. The results showed that all participants involved in the study acquired the target vocabulary, increased motivation, and deepened strategy use gradually over time. The program supported both contextualized and motivated vocabulary learning processes in realistic situations.

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