Systems with interaction

Human development arises as a function of participation in, and contribution to, historically formed and dynamically emergent social, symbolic, and material ecologies of association. When viewed this way, learning of whatever kind cannot be clearly separated from social fields and processes, material conditions, and living bodies (Bourdieu, 1984). In this sense, humans are open systems and development involves an ‘ensemble’ process orchestrated along a brain-body-world continuum (e.g., Spivey, 2007; Cowley & Steffensen, 2007; Steffensen, 2013). An open systems approach is particularly relevant to understanding technology-mediated communicative and cognitive activity since the meditational means at hand transform the morphology of human action in ways that potentially enable and constrain developmental trajectories. In this talk, I describe instances of “learning in the wild” (borrowing from Hutchins, 1995), highlighting the relevance of situatedness and place in language learning interventions using mobile Augmented Reality (AR), the primary objective of which is to embed languaging events and resources in phenomenologically rich and embodied experience in the world (Hellermann, Thorne, & Fodor, 2017; Thorne et al., 2015; Thorne & Hellermann, 2017; Zheng et al., 2018). Our video analysis of language learners engaged in AR activity draws from multiple approaches (activity theory, the ‘distributed language view’ (Thibault, 2011), usage-based linguistics, multimodal ethnomethodology, posthumanism) and illustrates the achievement of ongoing co-action through visible embodied displays, the performance of new actions through coordinated (re)use of public semiotic resources (Goodwin, 2013), and perhaps controversially, the physical surround as actant in the sequential production of action in interaction. Steven L. Thorne (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is Professor of Second Language Acquisition in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University (USA), with a secondary appointment in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His interests include formative interventions in world languages education contexts, intercultural communication, communication across new media and mobile technologies, indigenous language revitalization, and research that draws upon contextual traditions of language analysis and usage-based and distributed approaches to language development. In 2014, he was selected to receive the Faculty Research Excellence Award for assistant and associate professors at Portland State University. His research has appeared in numerous journals, edited collections, and books, the latter including Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development (with James Lantolf, Oxford, 2006), Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education (with Julie Belz, Thomson/Heinle, 2006), Language, Education, and Technology, Volume 9 of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd Edition) (with Stephen May, Springer, 2017), and Engaging the World: Social Pedagogies and Language Learning (with Sébastien Dubreil, Cengage, 2017). 9:30 – 12:00 HUMANS, ARTIFACTS, AND ENVIRONMENTS AS SYSTEMS IN INTERACTION Dr. Steven L. Thorne