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Writing is a recording process involving complex dynamic behaviours, which is closely connected with authentic contexts. A free authentic context can form a link with students' life experience and their prior knowledge, so that students' deep writing skills can be stimulated. However, in traditional writing activities, the lack of authentic experience is an important reason for students' poor writing achievements and low behavioural engagement. To address this problem, the current study used a spherical video‐based virtual reality (SVVR)‐supported Chinese composition writing approach, which can provide authentic contexts to support students' deep writing. An SVVR experiential learning model was developed and a quasi‐experiment was conducted in a primary school to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. A total of 59 fourth‐grade students from China were recruited and were randomly divided into the experimental group, which adopted the SVVR‐supported learning approach, and the control group, which adopted the non‐SVVR‐supported learning approach. The results show that the proposed approach can promote students' transition of learning behavioural engagement from medium to high, as well as the development of deep writing skills. It was found that students learning with the SVVR approach who acquired better deep writing skills tended to demonstrate better writing performance in relation to linguistic expressiveness and creative thinking than the students learning with the non‐SVVR approach. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic There is an urgent need to use immersive technologies to promote deep learning and stimulate students' learning behavioural engagement in writing.Spherical video‐based virtual reality (SVVR) is one of the immersive VRs with a low technical barrier and low cost, which meets the needs of school settings.SVVR has been applied in areas of language, engineering, science, etc., while its impacts on students' composition writing achievements have generally been ignored, especially in primary schools.The characteristics of immersion, interaction and imagination in SVVR that allow students to have opportunities of experiential learning can potentially promote students' writing performance.What this paper adds A novel experiential learning model supported by the SVVR learning system was developed.An SVVR‐supported composition writing approach based on the proposed experiential learning model was used to promote primary school students' deep writing.It was found that students' composition writing performance, learning behavioural engagement and deep writing skills can be improved by applying the SVVR‐supported learning approach in writing courses.Implications for practice and/or policy It is worth promoting the application of SVVR in school settings because it is a low‐tech and low‐cost method of creating immersive learning environments.The SVVR‐supported composition writing approach is useful for promoting primary school students' deep writing.Further investigations on the effects of employing this approach in writing, with careful consideration of the development for interactivities of SVVR, are expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to write is one of the key literacies required by students in relation to 21st century skills and is an emphasis of early education. Although the ability to write is a vital foundation for further education, due to the lack of authentic experience and limited instructional methods, cultivating writing ability in the early stage of education is still a significant challenge for students in elementary schools. Therefore, the majority of students are not able to actively engage in the process of learning to write. To address these problems, this study proposes a motivational AR-based (MAR) learning approach to support students in learning to write, which not only provides an authentic learning environment, but also aims to motivate students' active writing. Its effects were verified through a quasi-experiment. A total of 47 elementary school students from China were invited to participate, and were assigned to either an experimental group (EG) which was exposed to the MAR approach or the control group (CG) which was exposed to the motivational learning approach in a conventional environment (MC). The results showed that the proposed MAR learning approach improved the students' writing performance in terms of feature descriptiveness and thinking innovation. It can be found that, compared with the CG, the achievement gaps between the low- and high-engagement students were much larger in the EG. In addition, the sequential pattern analysis results showed that students who learned with the MAR learning approach concentrated more on the process of observation than those who learned with the MC learning approach, and they tended to exhibit less distracted behaviours. To sum up, the proposed MAR learning approach was effective in terms of facilitating elementary school students' writing education. The main contribution of our study is that it provides evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed MAR learning approach and opens up opportunities for future studies which aim to further explore its impacts in different designs of writing learning activities. • A motivational AR-based learning approach for Chinese writing education is proposed. • The approach is proposed based on motivational (ARCS) model. • An experiment was conducted in an elementary school writing course. • The approach improved students' writing creativity and performance. • The approach improved students' learning behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]