The University of Miami implemented a Virtual Immersion Program in Portuguese and Spanish in 2011. This program has been very successful; currently, the VIP schedules more than one hundred sessions each semester with approximately several partner universities in different countries. In 2017, the program expanded to include French. It will soon also conduct sessions in Arabic, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese.
The Virtual Immersion Program (VIP) is an online language exchange program, wherein students from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami are paired with native speakers from universities abroad where our students’ target language is spoken, and their partners are English learners.
Our students collaborate via video-conferencing applications by spending half of each session conversing in their target language and, the other half, by sharing their own language and culture with their overseas partners. Some session lasts 50 minutes; 25 minutes are conducted in English and 25 minutes in the target language and others last 1h15 minutes, 37 minutes in each language.
UM students are given learning tasks to complete during their session and are also strongly encouraged to learn about the culture(s) of their partner’s country. Thus, our students develop a deeper understanding of their partner’s home culture, country and language as well as gaining new perspectives of their own. This approach is mutually beneficial for both partners.
Moving beyond textbook dialogues to real-life conversations, helps students prepare for future study abroad opportunities and helps them become more confident in their new language. They find that they not only develop conversational skills through their practices with their partners, but they also learn substantially more about the culture of the language they are leaning.
