Investigating the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality for Culture Learning

People who are to live, study and work abroad will face more challenges in the new cultural environment and suffer more acculturative stress. Virtual Reality (VR), by which an immersive learning environment can be built, may help them adapt to a foreign culture at a lower cost of time and money. In order to work out a design method for culture learning in VR, we have designed a VR application so that learners can experience and learn the typical western festival culture - Christmas culture - in an immersive environment. To evaluate the effectiveness of the VR method, 50 EFL Chinese university students were enrolled in our experiments and randomly assigned to the VR group and the non-VR group, the data was drawn from cultural knowledge questionnaire, behavior test and Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS). The ANCOVA revealed no major effect for group factor on knowledge learning. Similarly, the Mixed ANOVA identified no major effect for group factor on behavior learning and attitude learning. There was no interaction effect between time and group in all experiments. Our results show that the VR method is preferred by most of the participants, but it shows no remarkable advantage over the non-VR method. Moreover, regression analysis between the culture learning and the sense of presence in VR shows that presence has the potential to improve the performance of intercultural interaction engagement. Our findings are of practical value for culture learning in VR.