Motivation and Reading in High-Immersion Virtual Reality

Many language learners lack the motivation to read complex texts. Because high-immersion Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly reported to be highly motivating, the goal of our study was to compare English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' (N=79) motivation while reading a story with subtitles in VR (experimental group) versus reading the same story screencast in two-dimensions (2D -- control group). The Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed that learners' motivation in VR was significantly higher compared with the control group. Our finding confirmed that VR is highly motivational in the context of reading foreign texts and can be useful for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) researchers, practitioners, and instructional designers. This analysis is a part of a larger study (Kaplan-Rakowski & Gruber, 2023) on VR facilitating reading tasks. [For the complete volume, "Intelligent CALL, Granular Systems and Learner Data: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2022 (30th, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 17-19, 2022)," see ED624779.]