Designing and Evaluating a "Guided Social Immersion" Workshop in VRChat for L2 Speaking Practice

Open social virtual reality platforms, such as VRChat, provide immersive environments with high ecological validity for second language (L2) speaking practice. However, learners often face significant barriers in these settings, particularly social anxiety and a lack of pedagogical structure, which hinder effective engagement. This study introduces "Guided Social Immersion" (GSI), an intervention model co-designed with experts to establish a dynamic balance between learner autonomy and instructional scaffolding. Adopting an exploratory case study approach, we investigated the impact of the GSI workshop on 12 Japanese learners' Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and embodiment through mixed-methods data, including pre- and post-test questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that the GSI model significantly enhanced learners' WTC. Furthermore, avatar-mediated interaction effectively mitigated the fear of negative evaluation, while a hierarchical task structure provided robust scaffolding for meaningful linguistic output. This research distills three educational design implications for social VR environments, providing a valuable reference for the practice of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in virtual environment.