O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Communication and virtual worlds 
Virtual worlds constitute an arena for developing multimodal communication, as 
participants have a range of communication opportunities including voice, images and 
text, as well as their avatar features such as gestures and movement. There is a recent 
body of research which is starting to grow regarding the study of communication in 
MUVEs (Molka-Danielsen & Deutschmann, 2009; Wankel & Kingsley, 2009). Thus, due to 
the advent of 3D MUVEs, the study of communication has become more complex. It is 
not enough to use text-based CMC approaches such as text-based chats, because 3D 
MUVEs have other modes and channels of communication which should be accounted for. 
Apart from audio and written channels, there are other modes that should be taken into 
account such as the virtual representation each participant chooses when designing their 
avatar, proxemics, as well as how the in-world environment is laid out and how avatars 
interact with the environment. 
The objective of this study is to analyze the
teacher and student interaction that takes 
place in a formal learning situation in the virtual world of Second Life. The participants 
are first-year undergraduate students of Tourism taking their first course in ESP. The 
students and their teacher met on a voluntary basis in Second Life with their teacher 
after their classes. In these virtual world sessions, the students carried out tasks based 
on the syllabus of the English undergraduate course they were undertaking. This study 
aims to describe the communication strategies that occur in an environment with limited 
paralinguistic communication and to observe if there are any communication strategies 
inherent to a 3D virtual world. Moreover, we want to observe what communication 
channel or channels are put into play when a communication strategy is used and if there 
is a preferred channel or combination of channels for a certain communication strategy.