China uses Virtual Worlds to teach kids English?

With all my "wonderful" experiences in virtual worlds lately for my digital media class at RIT, you can understand why hearing news that China has begun using them to teach their children English caught my attention more than it normally would.

Apparently a "virtual school" (in every sense of the phrase) called Wiz World Online is the pioneer that's getting attention. It's run through a computer company in Massachusetts called 8D World, and is a digital haven for Chinese-speaking kids wanting to learn the English language. As typical for virtual worlds, each player in Wiz World gets an avatar to customize. But in order to get through the game and their score, players need to pronounce words properly in English by speaking them into a microphone that uses the latest in speech recognition and pronunciation assessment software. Depending on the success of this campaign in China, the company plans to create a similar school for Korean Children, and then perhaps Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian kids as well.

Honestly I'm all for them trying a similar technique for foreign languages here in the United States. Japanese has been a hard language for me to master because the nature of it is obviously not Latin-based, and many of the sounds and grammar are brand-new. Something like this, even for adults, would be an amazing interactive experience that would help increase language skills exponentially, especially in today's times that are becoming increasingly technologically interdependent.