Constructing L2 Learning Spaces: Ways to Achieve Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom

Abstract

The language classroom and contexts beyond provide different environments for learning. In the classroom, L2 users are typically and primarily labeled ‘learners’, whereas beyond the classroom, ‘in the wild’ to borrow a term from Hutchins (1995), any aspect of their identity might take prominence (Firth and Wagner 1997). Drawing on data sets from classroom and non-classroom settings, this article shows two examples of the interactional work that goes into preparing for learning and how the ensuing learning/teaching activities are carried out. In both cases, participants co-construct learning/teaching spaces; the article shows how the two contexts call on different resources to accomplish this. Moreover, the actual learning sequences in interaction, framed around repair activities, are different in the two contexts; in the wild, the learning space is more condensed, embedded in the business-doing of the service encounter, whereas in class the activities are more extensive, the consequentiality is relaxed as speakers easily refer back to previous repair work and word searches, and they draw on writing and reading to an extent arguably rarely possible in non-classroom contexts.