The emergence of virtual reality technology provides great convenience for English teaching work and greatly promotes the reform and innovation of English education. In order to effectively integrate virtual reality technology with English contextual teaching, this paper constructs an English teaching context based on virtual reality panoramic video. Paired-sample t-test and social network analysis are chosen as the data processing methods to carry out a college English contextual teaching experiment in two parallel classes in the second year of non-English majors in D colleges and universities in Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province, China, to explore the effect of the application of the English contextual teaching model based on VR panoramic video proposed in this paper on the students’ English learning. The posttest score of the experimental class is 68.69, which is 6.8 points higher than that of the control class, and presents a significant difference with a significance probability of 0.012<0.05 in the ttest result. The clustering coefficient of the community network of English translation activities in the experimental class is as high as 0.85, the social network connection is dense, and the students are all able to actively participate in English learning activities.
