The Interview Result

Even though we have set the questionaaire, I adjusted my questions a little bit based on my understanding and further interest towards the institution and the founder's responses.

Teaching Goal and Objective:
What are your teaching goals and objectives?
I hope to provide a community for language learning that is freely available to everyone
Year:
How long has your institution been found?
5 months
Features of school:
What kind of teaching method do instructors usually use?
the methods are a bit different in SL because of the differences in levels, cultures, and technology.also the size of the classes are unnaturally large.
I think we mostly use the communicative or colaborative approach.we also tend to use task beased learning.I form the lessons into Present Practice and Perform also.
Which skills do you focus on?
Speaking
Media:
What kind of media do you use? (ex: video clips, PPT, podcast)
we use photos, built and scripted objects, and maybe blog huds connected to LMS systems
Teaching Material:
Do you use any teaching materials?
We write our own material using notecards in SL
Schedule (Time):
Do you have classes for students in different time zones?
I don't. it whenever I am available. The others seem to follow since I have developed a following in the beginning. and since I am in Asia the times I teach work best for Asian and Australia. We hope to have times better suited for other parts of the world.
Can I know which country are you in?
Japan.
How long is each class?
3 hours
Teacher:
How many teachers are there in your institution?
4
What are the backgrounds of the teachers?
They are from america and mostly professors
What are the criteria for choosing teachers?
I don't choose them..they are volunteers. We are not a school, just a group of people trying to help each other teach or learn languages
Student:
How many students in each class?
average about 15 per class
How many students in your institution?
almost 150 members
What is the major age group of students? (18-25, 26-34, 35-42, 43-50, above?)
I don't know everyone's age because asking is rude..but I would say over 30
What are students’ nationalities?
everywhere not Africa yet. oh and Mexico
Most of them are from asia?
hmmm i think so...but its changing. 50-50 now
Class fee:
Are these classes available for free?
Free
How much for each class?
Free
Do you have an website
Yes. http://professormerryman.com/cypris-chat/

Chatting In Cypris Village

About two weeks ago, I participated in the group of Cypris Village, which I intend to do the research on. In fact, I didn’t show my intention of interviewing the community at first, but the founder greeted me enthusiastically and answered my questions patiently. It was a nice beginning for me, since I have encountered countless difficulties in interviewing language institutions.

In order to have better understanding of my target interviewee, I attended the class the next day I aimed at it. Class hours are from 9 to12 in second life time, Monday to Thursday, three hours each time in total. I found out there were lots of participants from Japan in our class and the professor seems to speak Japanese well even if he’s an American. It is an English learning community based on voice chat, assisting with text chat. The topic we discussed that day was how to respond to people who are talking about nonsense, something offensive, trying to piss you off. There were 15 people in the class and one-third was native speakers from America, Australia, and Malaysia. The others were from German, Japan, china, etc. For the first hour, the leading instructor greeted everyone of us one by one and asked us to share the most unpleasant chatting experience in SL. For the second hour, we received a notecard on which phrases you could use to respond were listed. Then we took turns to play roles in an offensive guy and a responder. In addition to learning the useful phrases, our intonations of representing these phrases were also corrected by the instructors. We worked together on thinking other possible responses as well and it was really interesting to join the role playing. For the last hour, we visited and looked around another place for fun. Within the three hours, when the leading instructor chatting with us, another instructor will explain some words in the conversation immediately with text.

It was such a nice experience in SL and I was sparked to have further attendances at the community in the future.

English Learning Institution

As you would learn, there are numerous language institutions in SL, but how do learners choose those communities which are suitable for them seems to be an unsettled question. We would like to focus on having more insight into different English learning institutions and at the same time, we set up a set of criteria to assist individual learners in choosing language schools.

Since our group has decided to do a research on English leaning institutions, we’ve started to sort out whatever institutions we have interest in. However, things seem not to go smoothly when we tried to interview the founder of the institutions we opted for. Therefore, it took lots of time for most of us to stick at least two institutions at the same time for interviewing successfully, since most of the time, we couldn’t bump into the founder there, even the members.

The institution I chose to do is Cypris Village. So far I have still worked on interviewing my target founder within several times because he is quite busy and before I officially interview him, I attended the class the community provided every week to have better understanding of the language learning community
The questionnaire we have designed is as following:

Teaching Goal and Objective:
What are your teaching goals and objectives?
Year:
How long has your institution been found?
Features of school:
What kind of teaching method do instructors usually use?
Teaching Method
Which skills do you focus and what teaching methods do you use?
Media:
What kind of media do you use? (ex: video clips, PPT, podcast)
Teaching Material:
Do you use any teaching materials?
Schedule (Time):
Do you have classes for students in different time zones?
How long is each class?
Teacher:
How many teachers are there in your institution?
What are the backgrounds of the teachers? (American, Europeans, Canadians, British?)
What are the criteria for choosing teachers?
Student:
How many students in each class?
How many students in your institution?
What is the major age group of students? (18-25, 26-34, 35-42, 43-50, above?)
What are students’ nationalities?

Class fee:
Are these classes available for free?
How much for each class?

Do you have a website ?