This study draws on the social turn in second language learning informed by sociolinguistics and sociocultural approaches through the investigation of wayfinding events (Hodges, 2007a) that take place in a mobile-enabled, place-based language game (Mo‘o S) environment. This game was designed for a hybrid course in an intensive ESL program. In this paper, we present two case studies with in-depth multimodal analysis (Baldry & Thibault, 2006) on students’ activities during one single quest in Mo‘o S. In both cases, students, as autonomous agents, are consistently engaged in ongoing activities that we define as languaging, value-realizing and caretaking (Hodges, Steffensen & Martin, 2012) in order to achieve completion of the quest. Furthermore, by utilizing various semiotic resources, students coordinated their actions through common ground alignment, prospective coordination and co-action (Newgarden et al, 2015). Through the analysis of the students’ game-playing data via their coordinated activities, their initiation of actions, as well as the the evolving roles of each player, we conclude that mobile-enabled ecological language learning affords learners the opportunity to experience first-order languaging (Thibault, 2011) as a member of and a contributor to the community instead of focusing on second-order language in a classroom-based learning environment.
Baldry, A., & Thibault, P. J. (2006). Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis: A multimedia toolkit and associated on-line coursebook. Equinox.
Hodges, B. H. (2007). Good prospects: Ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation. Language sciences, 29(5), 584-604.
Hodges, B. H., Steffensen, S. V., & Martin, J. E. (2012). Caring, conversing, and realizing values: new directions in language studies. Language Sciences, 34(5), 499-506.
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. IAP.
Newgarden, K., Zheng, D., & Liu, M. (2015). An eco-dialogical study of second language learners' World of Warcraft (WoW) gameplay. Language Sciences, 48, 22-41.
Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: the distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 210-245.
