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environments on the social behaviour of users, con-
stitutes a particularly interesting topic for the re-
searchers in sociology. In fact, they highlighted a phe-
nomenon of disinhibition and facilitation which leads
to a greater sociability (Suler, 2004)(Coleman, 2007).
As social human beings, we adjust our behaviour with
the social norms in face to face communication. We
know, thanks to our education and our culture, what is
socially acceptable or not. Communicating by inter-
posed computers strongly decreases this adjustment
because we cannot observe in real-time the effects of
our words and of our writings.
In order to propose credible and powerful commu-
nication between avatars, the characteristics of the hu-
man communication must be taken into account: lan-
guage with explicit or implicit references to the ob-
jects of the environment, gestures, postures, facial ex-
pressions. These elements of communication are all
the more important since the avatar is immersed in
a three-dimensional world populated by objects, per-
sonages and places more or less characteristic which
sometimes echoes the real world.
The models suggested by El Jed (El Jed et al.,
2006) try to take into account intentional communica-
tion as well as non-intentional communication in the
interpretation of the acts of communication between
avatars. In this context, the favoured mode of com-
munication is natural language combined with deic-
tic gestures. The difficulty, in this case, consists in
using markers like vocal intensity, voice intonation,
or indexical or deictic references (“I”, “here”, “over
there”) associated with the designation gesture to de-
termine the relevant interpretation of the exchanges.
The direction of the gaze can also be exploited in
order to focus the visual attention of the interlocu-
tors towards a specific place in the shared environ-
ment. The facial expressions are essential during the
exchanges and constitute the first channel to commu-
nicate emotions. They can express mood, approval or
disapproval, but also the whole panel of the human
emotions (fear, joy, etc.). All these manifestations of
the human communication would be very useful in
the domain of education, specially for the develop-
ment of e-learning techniques used for the realisation
of virtual campuses (De Lucia et al., 2009).
3 LANGUAGE LEARNING
Language learning in virtual worlds is a new field of
research which is still open to innovations. How can
we create technological advances in order to create
an optimal psycholinguistic environment for language
learning? What makes new proposals innovative and
helpful? In order to answer these questions we are
currently developing some empirical support.
We believe that one potential source of guidance
may be offered by some methodological principles
of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) applied
to distance foreign language teaching (Doughty and
Long, 2003). It should be noted that the TBLT as-
pect of our work is currently under development.
The general idea is allowing teachers to create TBLT
units via the Moodle learning environment system
(http://www.moodle.org), and then to use SLoodle
(http://www.sloodle.org). SLoodle is an open source
project which integrates Moodle components in Sec-
ond Life.
Our approach (i.e., the Multilingual-Assisted Chat
Interface) must be considered as an innovative form of
Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL).
4 THE MULTILINGUAL
ASSISTED CHAT INTERFACE
The Multilingual-Assisted Chat Interface is a tool of-
fering new functionalities to the chat users in Virtual
worlds. It is directly embedded in some virtual worlds
viewers (to date: Second Life and Solipsis).
In order to implement those functionalities (de-
scribed in Section 4.2), we modified the source code
of the viewers (see Section 4.5).
The Multilingual-Assisted Chat Interface mainly
relies on the Multilingual Information Framework
(Cruz-Lara et al., nd), which is a standard being cur-
rently developed by the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO).
4.1 Generalities about Chat Interfaces
The term “chat” refers to a real-time written dialogue,
using a computer. The chat presents many similarities
with the oral dialogue. In fact, it surely is the written
means of communication which is the closest to it.
Indeed, it is closer than other tools, such as forums
and email.
Most of the time (for example in Second Life), the
chat is volatile. In fact, the contents of a chat session,
like an oral conversation, is not intended to be avail-
able to the public. Furthermore, when a user logs in,
he totally ignores what has been said before his ar-
rival. Similarly he cannot know what will be said after
his disconnection. Moreover, the chat users introduce
into their writing some elements which are specific to
oral communication.
The chat is usually based on a client-server archi-
tecture, meaning that users do not communicate di-
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