Abstract:
Speaking is one of the essential skills needed to be developed by any English learner. But
the English curriculum taught by Sri Lankan schools often focuses on providing English
vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension but pay less attention to enhance oral
communication skills. This leads to a lack of practice in spoken English. Therefore, that
affects a wide spectrum of applications such as business communication, presentation of
creative work, etc. Other problems are anxiety, fear, lack of confidence, and nervousness
of speaking English. This research focuses on designing a Virtual Reality (VR) based
application for the above-mentioned problems and it facilitates a more convenient and yet
natural experience through the use of techniques such as VR, Natural Language
Processing (NLP), etc. to expand the English oral and understanding ability. This VR
based solution will enhance the oral practice of the language and reduce the lack of
confidence while improving the speech and comprehensive skills of Sri Lankan school
students. Users can practice the application anywhere with common real-world scenarios
such as conversing during a doctor’s appointment, buying dresses from a shop, etc. This
game-based learning tool helps to evaluate the users and they can get scores according to
their performance. At the same time, it facilitates to expand their English speech and
comprehension ability. To measure the effectiveness of this application, user evaluation
was done as a pre-experimental method with a one-shot case study with the use of pre-test
and post-test design. A total of 30 local students following the local English language
curriculum between grades eight and ten were selected as a sample for this purpose. The
t-test analysis showed a value of 2.34 alongside a table value of 2.131 which depicts a
clear correlation between the usage of the application. Significant enhancement of oral
and comprehensive skills of the users was observed through the evaluation.
Keywords: Virtual reality, Natural language processing, Voice recognition, Speech
synthesis, Artificial intelligence
