Identifying Identity: Using Second Life in the Teaching of Sociolinguistics for the rasing of Gender Awareness

Abstract

[EN] This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A Second Step in Second Life), a project funded by Umeå University. One of the aims of the project is to make use of the affordances offered by Second Life in order to raise sociolinguistic language awareness among teacher trainees and other students studying courses in sociolinguistics. Several experiments were conducted where creative use of the avatar in combination with so-called voice morphing (a tool which allows the voice of the speaker to be distorted so that a male speaker can sound more feminine and vice versa) allowed students to enter the virtual world incognito in order to experience a different linguistic identity. Activities were conducted in cross-cultural settings involving students from Sweden and Chile. The paper presents the initial stages of development of a model for how language awareness issues can be internalised through first-hand experience in virtual worlds.