Archive
While this website focuses on the current Language Learning in the Wild (L2W) 2023–2026 initiative, the Archive documents the foundations on which it is built. It brings together earlier projects, research collaborations, publications, and practical experiments that have explored how languages are learned through participation in everyday life. Spanning more than a decade of work across different countries and contexts, these initiatives have contributed to the development of the Language Learning in the Wild approach and continue to inform its ongoing evolution.
🇩🇰
Interpersonal encounters for language practicing and language learning.
Building and expanding on cutting-edge research in second language learning from a usage-based perspective and second language interactional competence from an ethnomethodological perspective, the purpose of this project is to move from a dominating pedagogical focus on grammatical knowledge in language teaching to a view of language learning according to which knowledge is fundamentally usage-driven and experiential. The project thus explores the pedagogical consequences of a myriad of empirical evidence that have recently been brought forth in support of a usage-based, interaction-centred approach to language learning and teaching. In concrete terms it will do so by encouraging language students in the bilingual programme (Danish or German and English) in international business communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg, to socialize in the community where use of the language is natural and an everyday activity – and by providing the students with feedback on their activities and advice on how to propel them further.
This project combines ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM / CA) and usage-based linguistics (UBL) to investigate how intermediate to advanced L2 users talk about language encounters and learning outcomes, how they use the objects of the language encounters (reading material) in the process, and to what extent they develop their linguistic resources to do so over time. The project thus falls within the well-established frame of CA-SLA (Kasper & Wagner, 2011) – but broadens the perspective by also drawing on UBL, a set of linguistic models that find kinship in the assumption that language structure emerges in and through use, and that such linguistic structure is always and everywhere meaningful.
Recent research has substantiated many of UBL’s assumptions, e.g., that L2 learning is an exemplar-based process where L2 users gradually abstract common regularities among concrete recurring expressions and link them in experience as schemata of varying complexity and abstractness (e.g., Eskildsen, 2012; Ellis et al., 2013). The social-interactional situatedness of construction learning, however, is much overlooked. Given the usage-based assumption that our biographies of L2 use informs and determines our L2 competence, with constructional schemata emerging from specific occasions of use (Tomasello, 2003), it is a paradox that the relationship between such biographical history and emergent L2 repertoires remains unexplored (but see Eskildsen, 2011, 2012; 2015; Eskildsen et al., 2015).
Combining CA and UBL the project investigates the usage events which form the basis of construction learning, using out-of-classroom Danish L2 data, recorded by students of Danish at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg. The data consist of audio and video recordings of interactions from a range of different activities with the same students over a period of up to three years. Although the students’ participation in these activities overlap in time, i.e., they may do activity 1 and 2 around the same time in their learning biography, the order in which the activities are presented present some chronological orderliness:
Activity 1: The students get to know other students. The students get together with L1 speaking students from the other language branch of the study programme. They have not been instructed to talk about anything in particular, but have simply been encouraged to do things together.
Activity 2: Service encounters: the students do their everyday business in Danish. The everyday business includes going to shops (incl. asking for directions to get there), buying tickets, setting up a bank account, registrering as member in a sports club etc.
Activity 3: The students invite Danish speaking friends for dinner. They record themselves while preparing the meeting, from agreeing on what to eat, through grocery shopping and cooking to eating. In addition, the students have asked their Danish speaking friends to prepare to discuss up tothree themes (e.g., current affairs, work-related issues, study programme contents, politics etc.).
Activity 4: The students discuss non-curricular texts they have chosen to read, primarily news articles, the primary focus being on the extent to which the texts served as good sources of language learning. Preliminary analyses indicate that in situ discussions about new vocabulary draw heavily on embodied actions as the students use gestures to identify and reach agreement on word meanings.
The students’ activities form part of a larger project formed around on-going attempts to build a social infrastructure for advanced L2 learning in Sønderborg. This is necessary because we know that the students do not take sufficient advantage of having access to the L2 on their doorsteps – andwe know that the students are aware of the problematic consequences for their L2 learning potential. We do this through developing scaffold-building machinery; some high-tech (apps to locate potential conversation partners, an interactive game of language challenges in Sønderborg, a user-driven dictionary for smart-phones) others low-tech (encouraging the students to get together and later to start cooking clubs, asking the students to talk about reading material). Without these opportunities for inteacting, practicing and learning that we organize as part of a pedagogical infrastructure, many of our students do not move beyond basic L2 skills to be employed in recurring, routinized environments of a simple social fabric (e.g., service encounters, talk about weekend plans, agree on going to the movies etc.). In this particular project the focus is on interactional data from the low-tech condition as we examine the L2 speakers’ methods to talk about learning and to ascribe learning-related importance to objects, as well as investigate how the speakers develop these methods, including their linguistic resources, in comparable settings over time.
References:
Ellis, N C., O’Donnell, M. B. & Römer, U. 2013. Usage-based language: Investigating the latent structures that underpin acquisition. Language Learning 63: Supp. 1, 25–51.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2011. The L2 Inventory in Action: Conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics in SLA. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives, 337–373. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2012. Negation constructions at work. Language Learning 62, 2, 335–372.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2015. What counts as a developmental sequence?: Exemplar-based L2 learning. In J. Hulstijn, R. Ellis & S. W. Eskildsen (Eds), Language Learning [special issue: Orders and sequences in L2 acquisition: 40 years on], 35-62.
Kasper, G. and J. Wagner. 2011. A conversation-analytic approach to second language acquisition, in D. Atkinson (ed.): Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition. Taylor & Francis.
Tomasello, M. 2003 Constructing a language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
🇸🇪
Språkskap
Språkskap was a design-led project that conducted a series of design research experiments for supporting Swedish language learning outside of the classroom. The project focused on how to turn everyday situations between Swedish speakers and Swedish learners into “sites of language learning” through the development educational conceptualizations and material tools. This was based on a learning-by-doing pedagogic model whereby the process of creating personalized material with others provides beneficial language learning interactions unavailable in expert-created resources (such as text-books, audio programs, etc.).
The final project report, Språkskap: Swedish as a Social Language, is a vision calling into action four main players to contribute to language learning in a variety of contexts: Language learners, everyday citizens, language educators and private & public service providers.
Leaners: From passive student to active learner
Citizens: From language speaker to language coaches
Language Educations: From teaching language to supporting learners in daily practice
Private & Public Service Providers: From core business to providing an arena for language learning.
The project arose out of the observation that those who are interested in learning Swedish while in Sweden, often struggle to tap into the most powerful learning resource available: everyday interactions with Swedish speakers. It explored a shift in focus from learning vocabulary and grammar alone, to a more holistic and practical approach that involves where, when and with whom learners interact, and how to support them in turning their interactions into learning experiences.
Språkskap (2009 – 2010) was a collaboration between Folkuniversitetet, Ergonomidesign, and the Interactive Institute, funded by a VINNOVA grant for Vardags IT (Everyday IT).
Main contact:
+ Brendon Clark, Interactive Institute | brendon.clark@tii.se
+ Project report – not available at the moment
+ Språkskap paper (overview) from Include conference 2011
🇮🇸
The Icelandic Village
The Icelandic Village is a network of businesses in downtown Reykjavik that willingly accept and interact with Second Language Icelandic learners in Icelandic during everyday business interactions. Both the Second Language learners and business partners recieve basic instruction and support materials to guide their interactions. The Icelandic Village seeks to provide a safe environment where low level speakers of Icelandic can participate in everyday interaction with Icelandic speakers as a resource for learning.
he project partners represent expertise in second language aquisition in everyday life and experience design necessary for developing and studying a type of “living lab” – a guided real life enviornment. The instructional and support material will be developed and analysed through a series of collaborative workshops in Reykjavik. The project will be documented as a basis for understanding and improving guided participation both in relation to second langauge aquistion and experience and material design for supporting everday interactions.
What?
✚ The Icelandic Village is a an environment for L2 interaction outside the classroom. Participating in the Icelandic village is a group of companies in downtown Reykjavik and/or on the campus of the University of Iceland (in Reykjavik) that offer service in Icelandic to low level speakers of Icelandic. These customers will be able to conduct their daily life business in Icelandic in a place where the staff is trained to serve them: A guided participation in real-life interaction in Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village is a bridge between classroom interaction to real life interaction.
✚ In the Icelandic Village Second Language speakers of Icelandic such as second language learners of Icelandic, immigrants and even tourists have an opportunity to use Icelandic in their daily live.
✚ Real businesses such as a bakery, a Café, a bank etc. in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, will participate in the Icelandic Village.
✚ L2 learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland and preferably in other places that teach Icelandic, will be participating in a a new way of language learning. They get training in the classroom before going to the Icelandic Village to conduct business
✚ A learning material specific to the Icelandic Village is used for the training.
✚ The staff in the businesses in the Icelandic Village gets instruction in attending to customers who speak low level Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village has a specific design which makes it visible in the businesses and elsewhere.
✚ The Icelandic Village will be a model for language ‘Villages’ in other places such as in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Reykjavik.
Why?
✚ It is difficult to start speaking in a new language outside of the classroom.
✚ Learners of Icelandic use the new language exclusively in the classroom in the first year of learning.
✚ Locating suitable places outside of the classroom to use the language is not easy.
✚ Second language speakers of Icelandic are often responded to in English when they try to speak Icelandic to the locals.
✚ Language use is a condition for language learning.
✚ Language use in early stages of language learning can further the learning process.
✚ Interaction in the Icelandic Village between second language speakers of Icelandic and Icelanders contributes to mutual understanding and tolerance.
How?
✚ Foreign students of Icelandic at the University of Iceland get special training in the classroom to prepare them for the semi-real interaction in the Icelandic Village. They go through 6 steps of pedagogically designed process.
✚ Specially selected staff in the companies of the Icelandic Village are trained to serve low level speakers of Icelandic in Icelandic (rather than English).
✚ The environment in the companies has a special design characteristic for the Icelandic Village. Signs, banners and buttons will display to the customers that the company is participating in the Icelandic Village.
✚ The project is in co-operation between Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.
✚ The contribution from the University of Iceland is leading the project and providing both the theoretical background of the project and the site for the Pilot run.
✚ The contribution from the University of Southern Denmark is research in L2 learning in Everyday life environment as well as developing and designing material and workforms.
✚ The contribution from the Interactive Institute (Sweden) is to lead the design aspects of the Icelandic Village, support material and workforms through the organization and faciliation of design workshops with the various research and business participants.
Guided participation in real life interaction in Icelandic
Visiting elderly Icelanders
The new learning /teaching program The Icelandic Village has proven successful for beginning learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland for the past three years. A need for a similar program for more advanced learners has become obvious; the learners like the method and want to continue on the same path. Guðrún Theodórsdóttir got the idea to activate the group who had time and spoke Icelandic: elderly people. This has been the task of workshops with the participation of The University of Iceland, University of Southern Denmark, The Interactive Institute in Sweden and also participants from the Universities in Jyvaskyla and Tampere in Finland.
The result is a program using the framework of the Icelandic Village where learners visit elderly Icelanders in Activity centers for the elderly and have a conversation with them. They are prepared in the classroom in the same fashion as in the Icelandic Village. They visit the same elderly person twice and record both visits. Then they work with the teacher in the classroom evaluation the visits; how did it go? Problems? Success stories to share with other students? The final step in this program is to give a presentation in class on the two visits.
This method has been used for two years now and is under constant observation and repair; the group of learners is too big for this program (80-90 learners), and some of the elderly talk to many learners, which can be too much. However, the program has been welcomed in the activity centers and we have learned that both the elderly and the staff look forward to getting these visits. On one occasion an activity center, which we had not contacted, called and asked to have some of the students over. Thus, the program is beneficial to both the learners who get an opportunity for a longer conversation and in some cases get a new friend, and the elderly people who meet with these young people from all over the world and they get an opportunity to tell their stories.
🇫🇮
Finnish in the Wild
The purpose of this project is to investigate how participation in everyday social interactions enhances learning Finnish as a second language. Teaching of Finnish as a second language has been criticized for overemphasizing structures and for forgetting about the real life outside classrooms, i.e. teaching the second language as a foreign one. Research analyzing how Finnish is learned in everyday interactions – “in the wild”- is very limited at the moment.
The aims of this project are 1) to study how participation and exploration of every interaction in various social situations can be used to support second language learning, and 2) to develop systematic pedagogical methods that bridge the gap between learning in the classroom and participating in the community. The project is situated at the intersection of usage based and social interactional approaches to L2 learning (CA-SLA, in particular) and informed by design-based research.
The project is carried out at the Language Campus of the University of Jyväskylä and at the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. The data for the project comes from “learning-in-the-Wild” activities designed for courses focusing on conversational Finnish. These courses were taught at the Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and they were aimed at students who had basic skills in spoken Finnish. The activities were designed following the sit-talk-sit model developed in the Swedish Språkskap-project.
Currently, the project team is investigating two interrelated phenomena: the use of smart phones and the role of reported speech in language learning activities. The findings will contribute to a better understanding on the co-constructed nature of language learning activities in and outside of classrooms. On the basis of the findings the team will develop teaching materials and systematic pedagogical practices to bridge the gap between learning a language in classrooms and “real life” language use situations.
University of Southern Denmark + University of Jyväskylä + Tampere University + University of Iceland + Interactive Institute Swedish ICT
Language Learning in the Wild
Archive
While this website focuses on the current Language Learning in the Wild (L2W) 2023–2026 initiative, the Archive documents the foundations on which it is built. It brings together earlier projects, research collaborations, publications, and practical experiments that have explored how languages are learned through participation in everyday life. Spanning more than a decade of work across different countries and contexts, these initiatives have contributed to the development of the Language Learning in the Wild approach and continue to inform its ongoing evolution.
🇩🇰
Interpersonal encounters for language practicing and language learning.
Building and expanding on cutting-edge research in second language learning from a usage-based perspective and second language interactional competence from an ethnomethodological perspective, the purpose of this project is to move from a dominating pedagogical focus on grammatical knowledge in language teaching to a view of language learning according to which knowledge is fundamentally usage-driven and experiential. The project thus explores the pedagogical consequences of a myriad of empirical evidence that have recently been brought forth in support of a usage-based, interaction-centred approach to language learning and teaching. In concrete terms it will do so by encouraging language students in the bilingual programme (Danish or German and English) in international business communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg, to socialize in the community where use of the language is natural and an everyday activity – and by providing the students with feedback on their activities and advice on how to propel them further.
This project combines ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM / CA) and usage-based linguistics (UBL) to investigate how intermediate to advanced L2 users talk about language encounters and learning outcomes, how they use the objects of the language encounters (reading material) in the process, and to what extent they develop their linguistic resources to do so over time. The project thus falls within the well-established frame of CA-SLA (Kasper & Wagner, 2011) – but broadens the perspective by also drawing on UBL, a set of linguistic models that find kinship in the assumption that language structure emerges in and through use, and that such linguistic structure is always and everywhere meaningful.
Recent research has substantiated many of UBL’s assumptions, e.g., that L2 learning is an exemplar-based process where L2 users gradually abstract common regularities among concrete recurring expressions and link them in experience as schemata of varying complexity and abstractness (e.g., Eskildsen, 2012; Ellis et al., 2013). The social-interactional situatedness of construction learning, however, is much overlooked. Given the usage-based assumption that our biographies of L2 use informs and determines our L2 competence, with constructional schemata emerging from specific occasions of use (Tomasello, 2003), it is a paradox that the relationship between such biographical history and emergent L2 repertoires remains unexplored (but see Eskildsen, 2011, 2012; 2015; Eskildsen et al., 2015).
Combining CA and UBL the project investigates the usage events which form the basis of construction learning, using out-of-classroom Danish L2 data, recorded by students of Danish at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg. The data consist of audio and video recordings of interactions from a range of different activities with the same students over a period of up to three years. Although the students’ participation in these activities overlap in time, i.e., they may do activity 1 and 2 around the same time in their learning biography, the order in which the activities are presented present some chronological orderliness:
Activity 1: The students get to know other students. The students get together with L1 speaking students from the other language branch of the study programme. They have not been instructed to talk about anything in particular, but have simply been encouraged to do things together.
Activity 2: Service encounters: the students do their everyday business in Danish. The everyday business includes going to shops (incl. asking for directions to get there), buying tickets, setting up a bank account, registrering as member in a sports club etc.
Activity 3: The students invite Danish speaking friends for dinner. They record themselves while preparing the meeting, from agreeing on what to eat, through grocery shopping and cooking to eating. In addition, the students have asked their Danish speaking friends to prepare to discuss up tothree themes (e.g., current affairs, work-related issues, study programme contents, politics etc.).
Activity 4: The students discuss non-curricular texts they have chosen to read, primarily news articles, the primary focus being on the extent to which the texts served as good sources of language learning. Preliminary analyses indicate that in situ discussions about new vocabulary draw heavily on embodied actions as the students use gestures to identify and reach agreement on word meanings.
The students’ activities form part of a larger project formed around on-going attempts to build a social infrastructure for advanced L2 learning in Sønderborg. This is necessary because we know that the students do not take sufficient advantage of having access to the L2 on their doorsteps – andwe know that the students are aware of the problematic consequences for their L2 learning potential. We do this through developing scaffold-building machinery; some high-tech (apps to locate potential conversation partners, an interactive game of language challenges in Sønderborg, a user-driven dictionary for smart-phones) others low-tech (encouraging the students to get together and later to start cooking clubs, asking the students to talk about reading material). Without these opportunities for inteacting, practicing and learning that we organize as part of a pedagogical infrastructure, many of our students do not move beyond basic L2 skills to be employed in recurring, routinized environments of a simple social fabric (e.g., service encounters, talk about weekend plans, agree on going to the movies etc.). In this particular project the focus is on interactional data from the low-tech condition as we examine the L2 speakers’ methods to talk about learning and to ascribe learning-related importance to objects, as well as investigate how the speakers develop these methods, including their linguistic resources, in comparable settings over time.
References:
Ellis, N C., O’Donnell, M. B. & Römer, U. 2013. Usage-based language: Investigating the latent structures that underpin acquisition. Language Learning 63: Supp. 1, 25–51.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2011. The L2 Inventory in Action: Conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics in SLA. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives, 337–373. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2012. Negation constructions at work. Language Learning 62, 2, 335–372.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2015. What counts as a developmental sequence?: Exemplar-based L2 learning. In J. Hulstijn, R. Ellis & S. W. Eskildsen (Eds), Language Learning [special issue: Orders and sequences in L2 acquisition: 40 years on], 35-62.
Kasper, G. and J. Wagner. 2011. A conversation-analytic approach to second language acquisition, in D. Atkinson (ed.): Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition. Taylor & Francis.
Tomasello, M. 2003 Constructing a language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
🇸🇪
Språkskap
Språkskap was a design-led project that conducted a series of design research experiments for supporting Swedish language learning outside of the classroom. The project focused on how to turn everyday situations between Swedish speakers and Swedish learners into “sites of language learning” through the development educational conceptualizations and material tools. This was based on a learning-by-doing pedagogic model whereby the process of creating personalized material with others provides beneficial language learning interactions unavailable in expert-created resources (such as text-books, audio programs, etc.).
The final project report, Språkskap: Swedish as a Social Language, is a vision calling into action four main players to contribute to language learning in a variety of contexts: Language learners, everyday citizens, language educators and private & public service providers.
Leaners: From passive student to active learner
Citizens: From language speaker to language coaches
Language Educations: From teaching language to supporting learners in daily practice
Private & Public Service Providers: From core business to providing an arena for language learning.
The project arose out of the observation that those who are interested in learning Swedish while in Sweden, often struggle to tap into the most powerful learning resource available: everyday interactions with Swedish speakers. It explored a shift in focus from learning vocabulary and grammar alone, to a more holistic and practical approach that involves where, when and with whom learners interact, and how to support them in turning their interactions into learning experiences.
Språkskap (2009 – 2010) was a collaboration between Folkuniversitetet, Ergonomidesign, and the Interactive Institute, funded by a VINNOVA grant for Vardags IT (Everyday IT).
Main contact:
+ Brendon Clark, Interactive Institute | brendon.clark@tii.se
+ Project report – not available at the moment
+ Språkskap paper (overview) from Include conference 2011
🇮🇸
The Icelandic Village
The Icelandic Village is a network of businesses in downtown Reykjavik that willingly accept and interact with Second Language Icelandic learners in Icelandic during everyday business interactions. Both the Second Language learners and business partners recieve basic instruction and support materials to guide their interactions. The Icelandic Village seeks to provide a safe environment where low level speakers of Icelandic can participate in everyday interaction with Icelandic speakers as a resource for learning.
he project partners represent expertise in second language aquisition in everyday life and experience design necessary for developing and studying a type of “living lab” – a guided real life enviornment. The instructional and support material will be developed and analysed through a series of collaborative workshops in Reykjavik. The project will be documented as a basis for understanding and improving guided participation both in relation to second langauge aquistion and experience and material design for supporting everday interactions.
What?
✚ The Icelandic Village is a an environment for L2 interaction outside the classroom. Participating in the Icelandic village is a group of companies in downtown Reykjavik and/or on the campus of the University of Iceland (in Reykjavik) that offer service in Icelandic to low level speakers of Icelandic. These customers will be able to conduct their daily life business in Icelandic in a place where the staff is trained to serve them: A guided participation in real-life interaction in Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village is a bridge between classroom interaction to real life interaction.
✚ In the Icelandic Village Second Language speakers of Icelandic such as second language learners of Icelandic, immigrants and even tourists have an opportunity to use Icelandic in their daily live.
✚ Real businesses such as a bakery, a Café, a bank etc. in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, will participate in the Icelandic Village.
✚ L2 learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland and preferably in other places that teach Icelandic, will be participating in a a new way of language learning. They get training in the classroom before going to the Icelandic Village to conduct business
✚ A learning material specific to the Icelandic Village is used for the training.
✚ The staff in the businesses in the Icelandic Village gets instruction in attending to customers who speak low level Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village has a specific design which makes it visible in the businesses and elsewhere.
✚ The Icelandic Village will be a model for language ‘Villages’ in other places such as in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Reykjavik.
Why?
✚ It is difficult to start speaking in a new language outside of the classroom.
✚ Learners of Icelandic use the new language exclusively in the classroom in the first year of learning.
✚ Locating suitable places outside of the classroom to use the language is not easy.
✚ Second language speakers of Icelandic are often responded to in English when they try to speak Icelandic to the locals.
✚ Language use is a condition for language learning.
✚ Language use in early stages of language learning can further the learning process.
✚ Interaction in the Icelandic Village between second language speakers of Icelandic and Icelanders contributes to mutual understanding and tolerance.
How?
✚ Foreign students of Icelandic at the University of Iceland get special training in the classroom to prepare them for the semi-real interaction in the Icelandic Village. They go through 6 steps of pedagogically designed process.
✚ Specially selected staff in the companies of the Icelandic Village are trained to serve low level speakers of Icelandic in Icelandic (rather than English).
✚ The environment in the companies has a special design characteristic for the Icelandic Village. Signs, banners and buttons will display to the customers that the company is participating in the Icelandic Village.
✚ The project is in co-operation between Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.
✚ The contribution from the University of Iceland is leading the project and providing both the theoretical background of the project and the site for the Pilot run.
✚ The contribution from the University of Southern Denmark is research in L2 learning in Everyday life environment as well as developing and designing material and workforms.
✚ The contribution from the Interactive Institute (Sweden) is to lead the design aspects of the Icelandic Village, support material and workforms through the organization and faciliation of design workshops with the various research and business participants.
Guided participation in real life interaction in Icelandic
Visiting elderly Icelanders
The new learning /teaching program The Icelandic Village has proven successful for beginning learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland for the past three years. A need for a similar program for more advanced learners has become obvious; the learners like the method and want to continue on the same path. Guðrún Theodórsdóttir got the idea to activate the group who had time and spoke Icelandic: elderly people. This has been the task of workshops with the participation of The University of Iceland, University of Southern Denmark, The Interactive Institute in Sweden and also participants from the Universities in Jyvaskyla and Tampere in Finland.
The result is a program using the framework of the Icelandic Village where learners visit elderly Icelanders in Activity centers for the elderly and have a conversation with them. They are prepared in the classroom in the same fashion as in the Icelandic Village. They visit the same elderly person twice and record both visits. Then they work with the teacher in the classroom evaluation the visits; how did it go? Problems? Success stories to share with other students? The final step in this program is to give a presentation in class on the two visits.
This method has been used for two years now and is under constant observation and repair; the group of learners is too big for this program (80-90 learners), and some of the elderly talk to many learners, which can be too much. However, the program has been welcomed in the activity centers and we have learned that both the elderly and the staff look forward to getting these visits. On one occasion an activity center, which we had not contacted, called and asked to have some of the students over. Thus, the program is beneficial to both the learners who get an opportunity for a longer conversation and in some cases get a new friend, and the elderly people who meet with these young people from all over the world and they get an opportunity to tell their stories.
🇫🇮
Finnish in the Wild
The purpose of this project is to investigate how participation in everyday social interactions enhances learning Finnish as a second language. Teaching of Finnish as a second language has been criticized for overemphasizing structures and for forgetting about the real life outside classrooms, i.e. teaching the second language as a foreign one. Research analyzing how Finnish is learned in everyday interactions – “in the wild”- is very limited at the moment.
The aims of this project are 1) to study how participation and exploration of every interaction in various social situations can be used to support second language learning, and 2) to develop systematic pedagogical methods that bridge the gap between learning in the classroom and participating in the community. The project is situated at the intersection of usage based and social interactional approaches to L2 learning (CA-SLA, in particular) and informed by design-based research.
The project is carried out at the Language Campus of the University of Jyväskylä and at the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. The data for the project comes from “learning-in-the-Wild” activities designed for courses focusing on conversational Finnish. These courses were taught at the Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and they were aimed at students who had basic skills in spoken Finnish. The activities were designed following the sit-talk-sit model developed in the Swedish Språkskap-project.
Currently, the project team is investigating two interrelated phenomena: the use of smart phones and the role of reported speech in language learning activities. The findings will contribute to a better understanding on the co-constructed nature of language learning activities in and outside of classrooms. On the basis of the findings the team will develop teaching materials and systematic pedagogical practices to bridge the gap between learning a language in classrooms and “real life” language use situations.
University of Southern Denmark + University of Jyväskylä + Tampere University + University of Iceland + Interactive Institute Swedish ICT
Language Learning in the Wild
Archive
While this website focuses on the current Language Learning in the Wild (L2W) 2023–2026 initiative, the Archive documents the foundations on which it is built. It brings together earlier projects, research collaborations, publications, and practical experiments that have explored how languages are learned through participation in everyday life. Spanning more than a decade of work across different countries and contexts, these initiatives have contributed to the development of the Language Learning in the Wild approach and continue to inform its ongoing evolution.
🇩🇰
Interpersonal encounters for language practicing and language learning.
Building and expanding on cutting-edge research in second language learning from a usage-based perspective and second language interactional competence from an ethnomethodological perspective, the purpose of this project is to move from a dominating pedagogical focus on grammatical knowledge in language teaching to a view of language learning according to which knowledge is fundamentally usage-driven and experiential. The project thus explores the pedagogical consequences of a myriad of empirical evidence that have recently been brought forth in support of a usage-based, interaction-centred approach to language learning and teaching. In concrete terms it will do so by encouraging language students in the bilingual programme (Danish or German and English) in international business communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg, to socialize in the community where use of the language is natural and an everyday activity – and by providing the students with feedback on their activities and advice on how to propel them further.
This project combines ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM / CA) and usage-based linguistics (UBL) to investigate how intermediate to advanced L2 users talk about language encounters and learning outcomes, how they use the objects of the language encounters (reading material) in the process, and to what extent they develop their linguistic resources to do so over time. The project thus falls within the well-established frame of CA-SLA (Kasper & Wagner, 2011) – but broadens the perspective by also drawing on UBL, a set of linguistic models that find kinship in the assumption that language structure emerges in and through use, and that such linguistic structure is always and everywhere meaningful.
Recent research has substantiated many of UBL’s assumptions, e.g., that L2 learning is an exemplar-based process where L2 users gradually abstract common regularities among concrete recurring expressions and link them in experience as schemata of varying complexity and abstractness (e.g., Eskildsen, 2012; Ellis et al., 2013). The social-interactional situatedness of construction learning, however, is much overlooked. Given the usage-based assumption that our biographies of L2 use informs and determines our L2 competence, with constructional schemata emerging from specific occasions of use (Tomasello, 2003), it is a paradox that the relationship between such biographical history and emergent L2 repertoires remains unexplored (but see Eskildsen, 2011, 2012; 2015; Eskildsen et al., 2015).
Combining CA and UBL the project investigates the usage events which form the basis of construction learning, using out-of-classroom Danish L2 data, recorded by students of Danish at the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg. The data consist of audio and video recordings of interactions from a range of different activities with the same students over a period of up to three years. Although the students’ participation in these activities overlap in time, i.e., they may do activity 1 and 2 around the same time in their learning biography, the order in which the activities are presented present some chronological orderliness:
Activity 1: The students get to know other students. The students get together with L1 speaking students from the other language branch of the study programme. They have not been instructed to talk about anything in particular, but have simply been encouraged to do things together.
Activity 2: Service encounters: the students do their everyday business in Danish. The everyday business includes going to shops (incl. asking for directions to get there), buying tickets, setting up a bank account, registrering as member in a sports club etc.
Activity 3: The students invite Danish speaking friends for dinner. They record themselves while preparing the meeting, from agreeing on what to eat, through grocery shopping and cooking to eating. In addition, the students have asked their Danish speaking friends to prepare to discuss up tothree themes (e.g., current affairs, work-related issues, study programme contents, politics etc.).
Activity 4: The students discuss non-curricular texts they have chosen to read, primarily news articles, the primary focus being on the extent to which the texts served as good sources of language learning. Preliminary analyses indicate that in situ discussions about new vocabulary draw heavily on embodied actions as the students use gestures to identify and reach agreement on word meanings.
The students’ activities form part of a larger project formed around on-going attempts to build a social infrastructure for advanced L2 learning in Sønderborg. This is necessary because we know that the students do not take sufficient advantage of having access to the L2 on their doorsteps – andwe know that the students are aware of the problematic consequences for their L2 learning potential. We do this through developing scaffold-building machinery; some high-tech (apps to locate potential conversation partners, an interactive game of language challenges in Sønderborg, a user-driven dictionary for smart-phones) others low-tech (encouraging the students to get together and later to start cooking clubs, asking the students to talk about reading material). Without these opportunities for inteacting, practicing and learning that we organize as part of a pedagogical infrastructure, many of our students do not move beyond basic L2 skills to be employed in recurring, routinized environments of a simple social fabric (e.g., service encounters, talk about weekend plans, agree on going to the movies etc.). In this particular project the focus is on interactional data from the low-tech condition as we examine the L2 speakers’ methods to talk about learning and to ascribe learning-related importance to objects, as well as investigate how the speakers develop these methods, including their linguistic resources, in comparable settings over time.
References:
Ellis, N C., O’Donnell, M. B. & Römer, U. 2013. Usage-based language: Investigating the latent structures that underpin acquisition. Language Learning 63: Supp. 1, 25–51.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2011. The L2 Inventory in Action: Conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics in SLA. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives, 337–373. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2012. Negation constructions at work. Language Learning 62, 2, 335–372.
Eskildsen, S. W. 2015. What counts as a developmental sequence?: Exemplar-based L2 learning. In J. Hulstijn, R. Ellis & S. W. Eskildsen (Eds), Language Learning [special issue: Orders and sequences in L2 acquisition: 40 years on], 35-62.
Kasper, G. and J. Wagner. 2011. A conversation-analytic approach to second language acquisition, in D. Atkinson (ed.): Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition. Taylor & Francis.
Tomasello, M. 2003 Constructing a language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Språkskap
Språkskap was a design-led project that conducted a series of design research experiments for supporting Swedish language learning outside of the classroom. The project focused on how to turn everyday situations between Swedish speakers and Swedish learners into “sites of language learning” through the development educational conceptualizations and material tools. This was based on a learning-by-doing pedagogic model whereby the process of creating personalized material with others provides beneficial language learning interactions unavailable in expert-created resources (such as text-books, audio programs, etc.).
The final project report, Språkskap: Swedish as a Social Language, is a vision calling into action four main players to contribute to language learning in a variety of contexts: Language learners, everyday citizens, language educators and private & public service providers.
Leaners: From passive student to active learner
Citizens: From language speaker to language coaches
Language Educations: From teaching language to supporting learners in daily practice
Private & Public Service Providers: From core business to providing an arena for language learning.
The project arose out of the observation that those who are interested in learning Swedish while in Sweden, often struggle to tap into the most powerful learning resource available: everyday interactions with Swedish speakers. It explored a shift in focus from learning vocabulary and grammar alone, to a more holistic and practical approach that involves where, when and with whom learners interact, and how to support them in turning their interactions into learning experiences.
Språkskap (2009 – 2010) was a collaboration between Folkuniversitetet, Ergonomidesign, and the Interactive Institute, funded by a VINNOVA grant for Vardags IT (Everyday IT).
Main contact:
+ Brendon Clark, Interactive Institute | brendon.clark@tii.se
+ Project report – not available at the moment
+ Språkskap paper (overview) from Include conference 2011🇮🇸
The Icelandic Village
The Icelandic Village is a network of businesses in downtown Reykjavik that willingly accept and interact with Second Language Icelandic learners in Icelandic during everyday business interactions. Both the Second Language learners and business partners recieve basic instruction and support materials to guide their interactions. The Icelandic Village seeks to provide a safe environment where low level speakers of Icelandic can participate in everyday interaction with Icelandic speakers as a resource for learning.
he project partners represent expertise in second language aquisition in everyday life and experience design necessary for developing and studying a type of “living lab” – a guided real life enviornment. The instructional and support material will be developed and analysed through a series of collaborative workshops in Reykjavik. The project will be documented as a basis for understanding and improving guided participation both in relation to second langauge aquistion and experience and material design for supporting everday interactions.
What?
✚ The Icelandic Village is a an environment for L2 interaction outside the classroom. Participating in the Icelandic village is a group of companies in downtown Reykjavik and/or on the campus of the University of Iceland (in Reykjavik) that offer service in Icelandic to low level speakers of Icelandic. These customers will be able to conduct their daily life business in Icelandic in a place where the staff is trained to serve them: A guided participation in real-life interaction in Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village is a bridge between classroom interaction to real life interaction.
✚ In the Icelandic Village Second Language speakers of Icelandic such as second language learners of Icelandic, immigrants and even tourists have an opportunity to use Icelandic in their daily live.
✚ Real businesses such as a bakery, a Café, a bank etc. in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, will participate in the Icelandic Village.
✚ L2 learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland and preferably in other places that teach Icelandic, will be participating in a a new way of language learning. They get training in the classroom before going to the Icelandic Village to conduct business
✚ A learning material specific to the Icelandic Village is used for the training.
✚ The staff in the businesses in the Icelandic Village gets instruction in attending to customers who speak low level Icelandic.
✚ The Icelandic Village has a specific design which makes it visible in the businesses and elsewhere.
✚ The Icelandic Village will be a model for language ‘Villages’ in other places such as in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Reykjavik.
Why?
✚ It is difficult to start speaking in a new language outside of the classroom.
✚ Learners of Icelandic use the new language exclusively in the classroom in the first year of learning.
✚ Locating suitable places outside of the classroom to use the language is not easy.
✚ Second language speakers of Icelandic are often responded to in English when they try to speak Icelandic to the locals.
✚ Language use is a condition for language learning.
✚ Language use in early stages of language learning can further the learning process.
✚ Interaction in the Icelandic Village between second language speakers of Icelandic and Icelanders contributes to mutual understanding and tolerance.
How?
✚ Foreign students of Icelandic at the University of Iceland get special training in the classroom to prepare them for the semi-real interaction in the Icelandic Village. They go through 6 steps of pedagogically designed process.
✚ Specially selected staff in the companies of the Icelandic Village are trained to serve low level speakers of Icelandic in Icelandic (rather than English).
✚ The environment in the companies has a special design characteristic for the Icelandic Village. Signs, banners and buttons will display to the customers that the company is participating in the Icelandic Village.
✚ The project is in co-operation between Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.
✚ The contribution from the University of Iceland is leading the project and providing both the theoretical background of the project and the site for the Pilot run.
✚ The contribution from the University of Southern Denmark is research in L2 learning in Everyday life environment as well as developing and designing material and workforms.
✚ The contribution from the Interactive Institute (Sweden) is to lead the design aspects of the Icelandic Village, support material and workforms through the organization and faciliation of design workshops with the various research and business participants.
Guided participation in real life interaction in Icelandic
Visiting elderly Icelanders
The new learning /teaching program The Icelandic Village has proven successful for beginning learners of Icelandic at the University of Iceland for the past three years. A need for a similar program for more advanced learners has become obvious; the learners like the method and want to continue on the same path. Guðrún Theodórsdóttir got the idea to activate the group who had time and spoke Icelandic: elderly people. This has been the task of workshops with the participation of The University of Iceland, University of Southern Denmark, The Interactive Institute in Sweden and also participants from the Universities in Jyvaskyla and Tampere in Finland.
The result is a program using the framework of the Icelandic Village where learners visit elderly Icelanders in Activity centers for the elderly and have a conversation with them. They are prepared in the classroom in the same fashion as in the Icelandic Village. They visit the same elderly person twice and record both visits. Then they work with the teacher in the classroom evaluation the visits; how did it go? Problems? Success stories to share with other students? The final step in this program is to give a presentation in class on the two visits.
This method has been used for two years now and is under constant observation and repair; the group of learners is too big for this program (80-90 learners), and some of the elderly talk to many learners, which can be too much. However, the program has been welcomed in the activity centers and we have learned that both the elderly and the staff look forward to getting these visits. On one occasion an activity center, which we had not contacted, called and asked to have some of the students over. Thus, the program is beneficial to both the learners who get an opportunity for a longer conversation and in some cases get a new friend, and the elderly people who meet with these young people from all over the world and they get an opportunity to tell their stories.
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Finnish in the Wild
The purpose of this project is to investigate how participation in everyday social interactions enhances learning Finnish as a second language. Teaching of Finnish as a second language has been criticized for overemphasizing structures and for forgetting about the real life outside classrooms, i.e. teaching the second language as a foreign one. Research analyzing how Finnish is learned in everyday interactions – “in the wild”- is very limited at the moment.
The aims of this project are 1) to study how participation and exploration of every interaction in various social situations can be used to support second language learning, and 2) to develop systematic pedagogical methods that bridge the gap between learning in the classroom and participating in the community. The project is situated at the intersection of usage based and social interactional approaches to L2 learning (CA-SLA, in particular) and informed by design-based research.
The project is carried out at the Language Campus of the University of Jyväskylä and at the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. The data for the project comes from “learning-in-the-Wild” activities designed for courses focusing on conversational Finnish. These courses were taught at the Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and they were aimed at students who had basic skills in spoken Finnish. The activities were designed following the sit-talk-sit model developed in the Swedish Språkskap-project.
Currently, the project team is investigating two interrelated phenomena: the use of smart phones and the role of reported speech in language learning activities. The findings will contribute to a better understanding on the co-constructed nature of language learning activities in and outside of classrooms. On the basis of the findings the team will develop teaching materials and systematic pedagogical practices to bridge the gap between learning a language in classrooms and “real life” language use situations.
University of Southern Denmark + University of Jyväskylä + Tampere University + University of Iceland + Interactive Institute Swedish ICT
Language Learning in the Wild