Student configuration and place-making in fully online language learning

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how university students taking fully online language-learning configure their learning environments to enhance opportunities for learning and meet broader academic and social-emotional needs. The study adopts a view of learning as both physically and socially situated, acknowledging that the physical (material, digital and hybrid) resources available in each student's learning environment, as well as the opportunities they have to interact with other people, can play very significant roles in shaping learning activities and outcomes. The paper focuses on how students reconfigure the learning environments designed/provided for them by their teachers and the university. Through interviews with 26 students, a mixture of deliberate, creative and spontaneous actions they took were revealed. Students not only reconfigured the physical environments in which their learning activities were situated, but also the tasks they were set and ways of working with other people. There has been a growing interest in student contributions in task, task engagement and processes in CALL research. This paper extends this research into the physical and social domains, with a focus on students’ contributions to ‘place-making’. It argues that design for CALL is best seen as a process in which learning situations are co-configured by teacher-designers and students.

KEYWORDS:

• Online Language learning
• student configuration
• learning spaces
• space-making
• place-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Y. H. Sun

Susan Sun is a senior lecturer in the School of Language and Culture at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research focus in recent years has been on designing for fully online language learning. She has published several articles on the topic.