Exploring Facilitative and Debilitative Spaces: A Shift in Focus from Classrooms to Learning Systems

Physical classrooms are often overlooked in educational research. While teachers, students, materials, and methodologies have all been the foci of studies for many years, research into the spaces in which instructed second language acquisition takes place is, for the most part, absent in the literature. In Thomas (2018a, 2018b), I argued that exploring these spaces and the affordances they provide is a necessary endeavor if we are to offer a holistic view of learning. It should be noted that my discussion of learning spaces refers to formal education settings—classrooms—and not self-access centers. However, I believe that relevant work in the field of self-access learning can indeed inform classroom design in instructed settings. Therefore, I use this work to support my discussion. As a work-in-progress report, this short paper will first describe my work up until this point, and second, explain how my ideas about learning spaces have transformed over time. I will discuss a new direction in which this and other studies may take. This new direction involves viewing classroom spaces as complex language learning systems and harnessing successful strategies students use within these systems to allow learning to take place. This focus on learning spaces as complete systems, as opposed to just their physical characteristics, has implications for how students can be better prepared to learn beyond the classroom.