Scholars have emphasized the importance of situating learners in authentic learning contexts. Nevertheless, it is sometimes challenging to provide learners with real contexts owing to various reasons, such as safety or economic consideration. The advent of virtual reality (VR) has provided the opportunity to enable learners to experience and interact in authentic contexts. On the other hand, researchers have pinpointed that, during the VR learning process, a student’s attempt or engagement levels play an important role in their knowledge gains. That is, without a clear goal, their learning outcomes could be disappointing. Hence, the present study proposes a goal-oriented reflection strategy-based VR (GRS-VR) model. Moreover, a VR-based learning system is developed based on the model. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in an English-speaking course at a junior high school. Two classes of ninth graders were recruited in this study: one class was an experimental group adopting the GRS-VR learning approach, while the other was a control group adopting the conventional VR (C-VR) learning approach. The results indicated that the experimental group had significantly better English oral performance, learning motivation and reflective thinking than the C-VR group.