How Virtual Reality Can Change Finding a Community of Practice for Second Language Development

This conceptual paper reviews the literature around Virtual Reality, Second Language Development (Larsen-Freeman, 2015, 2019), and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This article shows how social virtual reality spaces, such as VRChat, can be used in second and foreign language classrooms by looking at these three topics. This article discusses how communities of practice are formed in these virtual spaces, how the communities use the spaces, and how these spaces can be utilized to aid a learner's language development. Due to the continual growth of the population who can access virtual reality and its growing use within research, it is the goal of this article to advocate for learners and educators to utilize these social spaces that provide rich moments of engagement and languaging (Swain, 2006) between the participants of the community. This article also advocates for updating the terminology used in the field by bringing into light three terms that can be used to distinguish between different forms of virtual reality