The Students' Perspective on “Gather Town” Virtual Meeting in Online Language Learning

Abstract

Since COVID-19 emerged and became a pandemic in Indonesia, the pattern of learning has also changed. Various efforts were made to make learning more effective. One of them is by using learning applications and learning websites. The applications used can be developed independently or using applications that have been developed and are free to use. This study discusses the use of the Gather Town Virtual Meeting (GTVM) Website in learning Mandarin speaking skills. GTVM is a virtual meeting platform that combines video calls with 2D maps. The appearance and content of Gather Town itself is similar to Video Game with 8 Bit video quality. The students of this study were 26 students. Two things that will become the research objectives in this research after learning by using the Gather Town Website are: 1. How to design online learning with GTVM as supporting tools in language learning; 2. How the students' perspectives about GTVM using in language online learning. The method in this research is the class action method. Students are asked to study Mandarin videos on GTVM. Then the students re-write the new vocabulary learned from each video and retell the contents of the story heard in Mandarin in their own language. The conclusion of this study is that students feel that learning through GTVM can encourage them to be more active in learning, increase new vocabulary knowledge and improve their speaking ability in Mandarin.