Foreign language teaching and learning in virtual worlds: The construct of affordance

The past decade has seen an extensive use of virtual worlds for foreign language (FL) teaching, however, researchers and practitioners in the field of virtual worlds for education have soon come to realise that only with a deep understanding of the potential and constraints of these environments, and of how learning takes place within them, can we learn how to use virtual worlds for education at their fullest. This awareness has shaped recent research in the field and an interest for a structured and theoretically supported pedagogy for virtual worlds has recently become more prominent. Following this, it has been proposed that, amongst others, the concept of affordance can be a useful tool for making sense of these heavily mediated spaces as learning environments. This paper stems from a research study on the affordances of virtual worlds for FL learning. The study investigates the multimodal data collected during an Italian language course, SLitaliano, conducted in Second Life(r) with a group of third-level students of Italian as a FL in an Irish institution. In the course of the study, the importance of a common, theoretically-supported conceptualisation of the construct of affordance was highlighted. It became clear that, in order to investigate language learning affordances in the field of ICT educational research and to move beyond a mere listing of potentials and negative aspects of these environments for learning, it is paramount that the construct of affordance is clearly conceptualised. This chapter frames what happens in the virtual word using Engeström's Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and views language from an ecological perspective, as a process that happens through interaction, and as part of a broader context comprising social conditions and students' concerns, attitudes and perceptions. The construct of affordance is subsequently rooted in this theoretical framework, and defined as an action in potential and a relation of possibilities between users. The operationalisation of the construct of affordance is then shown, using as an example the research study in question. Finally, a list of language affordances of virtual worlds that emerged from the study is presented.