Ecosystem-Wide Characteristics of an ESL Environment in Situ: An Affordance-Semiotics Perspective

Abstract

Investigating the phenomenon of how a learning environment affords opportunities for individual learners to learn has recently become an increasing interest among researchers of applied linguistics and psychology. Traditional perspective in this regard has tended to limit the phenomenon to the environment’s rigid conditions and novices’ controlled responses; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that broader strategies from other academic approaches may shed upon emergent relationships between the ever-changing environment and developing actions. With this trend in mind, this paper takes an ecological model based on the theory of affordances and semiotics of signs– a scope of epistemological thinking that conceives the inquiry as a second language (L2) learning ecology or an environmental system to supporting L2 learning actions. Upon this orientation, emphasis is placed on discovering actions situated in their original context (or in situ) and then the emergence of “ecosystem-wide characteristics”. By “ecosystem” it is meant that all interrelated levels of contexts are fundamental to the nature of connecting students to L2 learning. The research focused on a group of four secondary-school students in Hong Kong, in an after-school ESL (English as a second language) program over 12 lessons, examining a range of teaching-learning activities. In this paper, the ecology concerned is of informational signs interlocked for meaning-making purposes; one where signs flowed along direct and immediate perception-action heuristics for achieving L2 learning goals. Drawing upon the notion of “education-friendliness” (i.e., providing students with greater access to diverse sources of information for learning), there are implications for educational practitioners to use real-world engagement that is likely to tap students’ creativity and ignite motivational sparks for using L2 to understand the world more actively and strategically.