Abstract:

Multiculturalism is or should be a key concept in language teaching, in our globalized world. This intercultural/multicultural aspect of language teaching nowadays changes deeply its practice and design and transforms it to a privileged field of interdisciplinary research and applications. Integrating multiculturalism into foreign language teaching means thus to offer the students a learning environment in which they can interact and communicate –verbally and non-verbally- in multiple cultural frameworks.

The recent emergence of a new generation of services offered by the Web 2.0 appears hence as an ideal response to the needs of an innovating, intercultural and interdisciplinary teaching approach: they provide an interactive, attractive and flexible online digital environment, where students have the possibility to cooperate, communicate, develop their own content, and inform their personal learning environments in various disciplines and languages. Virtual worlds are part of these new learning environments, where students interact in real time in various linguistic and cultural situations.

A virtual world is a customizable 3Dimensional space which can be used – with the appropriate scenario and guidelines – as an innovative tool for interdisciplinary and multilingual/multicultural education. In this intercultural – by definition – 3D environment, interdisciplinarity motivates further the students, offering them basic, transversal knowledge and contributing to their personal development through the acquisition of linguistic, cultural and social competences.

This study will attempt to stress the crucial contribution of virtual worlds in modern, intercultural foreign language education, through interdisciplinary teaching approaches that focus on the various contacts with otherness. More specifically, this work focuses on the use of virtual worlds as a learning platform for the teaching of the French as a foreign language (FLE), in the context of the interdisciplinary curriculum in the secondary education.
In such an environment, the teaching procedure consists mostly in the development of speech acts, with their particular dynamics, which allow students to fully develop a set of competences in all linguistic (sociolinguistic, lexical, grammatical) and cultural levels and use them properly in various communication situations.

Our paper suggests and discusses two scenarios of virtual interdisciplinary approaches with different / distinctive pedagogical objectives for both the teacher and the student, trying to demonstrate the importance of the use of collaborative tools in modern foreign language education

Keywords:

Virtual Worlds, MUVE, OpenSim, Interdisciplinarity, Foreign Language Learning, ICT, FLE.