Language learning in virtual worlds: Designing for languaging, the role of affordances

This article will utilise data collected during SLItaliano, an Italian language course run in the Virtual World (VW) of Second Life® (SL®) in 2012. The course was offered to third level students of Italian as a Foreign Language (FL) in an Irish college, the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). It was designed and coordinated by the researcher and is at the core of a research on FL teaching in VWs. The focus of the paper is on identifying affordances for language learning in VWs, particularly languaging as a communicative practice (Swain, 2006). The concept of affordance is approached from an Activity Theory (AT) standpoint (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2012) as an “action possibility” present in the environment, which may or may not emerge. In the case of VWs as learning environments, such possibilities are not only provided by the characteristics of the hardware and of the software, but they are also shaped by the users and their history and by the context they find themselves in and may be “sequential and nested in time” (Hammond, 2010, p. 216). The possibility to engage in languaging was one of the affordances that emerged during SLItaliano. Languaging is defined as that practice when language is used in order to work at solving a problem or clarifying an issue (Swain & Lapkin, 2011). The data showed how certain tasks had a higher occurrence of languaging episodes and how particular situations prompted the recourse to languaging. The data will also show that when affordances which were expected to emerge failed to be noticed by the participants, the results were sometimes surprising and provided further insight into the potential of VWs for FL teaching.