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The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments

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The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2016 The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments Douglas W. Canfield University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Applied Linguistics Commons, Educational Psychology Commons, First and Second Language Acquisition Commons, Instructional Media Design Commons, and the Modern Languages Commons Recommended Citation Canfield, Douglas .,W "The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3683 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Douglas W. Canfield entitled "The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Educational Psychology and Research. Sebastien Dubreil, Trena M. Paulus, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Katherine H. Greenberg, Dolly J. Young, Lisa Yamagata-Lynch Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) The Discursive Construction of Language Teaching and Learning in Multiuser Virtual Environments A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Douglas W. Canfield May 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Douglas W. Canfield All rights reserved ii Dedication To my greatest teacher and dearest companion, Jessica Canfield, who, à son insu, brought me to this work. You have taught me more about communicating, loving, and being than I could ever learn from books and professors. You made this possible. I am indebted to you and will be forever and ever, so of what do I have to boast? I hope one day you will read this text, make your own connections and/or resonances, and share them with me. iii Acknowledgements —…the source of meaning is to be found not in the figures or in their backgrounds but in the difference between the two because it is the boundary around a figure that makes it exist as a thinkable thing (Wegerif, 2006, p. 145). No work is produced in a relational vacuum. I have many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. First, thank you to the students and teachers who participated in this project — your culture of use and enthusiasm for your “second” life-world have forever altered the way I look at the notion of language education. Thank you to my dissertation committee members for mentoring and supporting me in different and complementary ways throughout my Ph.D. program. I appreciate immensely the role you each have played in my development as a researcher and scholar. Dr. Trena Paulus, you have the patience of a saint. Thank you for challenging, guiding, encouraging, and at times tolerating the frustrating tendencies inherited from my humanities upbringing as I pursued this vastly different type of work. Dr. Sebastien Dubreil, thank you for allowing me to vent, for encouraging me to engage with the personalities behind the ideologies, and for seeing research as the most human of endeavors. Dr. Katherine Greenberg, thank you for asking the questions that obliged me to engage with cognitive research in a way that is honest and reflexive. Dr. Dolly Young, thank you for listening to and supporting my hopes and desires throughout this research process, my doctoral studies, and during our work together with Spanish students in Second Life that started it all. Finally, Dr. Lisa Yamagata-Lynch, thank you for your enthusiasm, and especially for allowing me to “crash” your research group to receive feed back from a perspective that I’m likely to face for much of my career. iv The Discourse Analysis Research Team members, Kathy Evans, Rachael Gabriel, Olivia Halic, Joshua Johnston, Jessica Lester, Deborah Lee, Vittorio Marone, and Trena Paulus, thank you for your support, encouragement, and helpful feedback. Many thanks as well to the Virtual Worlds cohort of the 2010 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, to the insights of the cohort directors, Tom Boellstorff and Douglas Thomas, and to the Social Science Research Council for the generous funding of the pilot study that led to this dissertation. Thank you to my friends and colleagues for their timely support and encouragement, especially Karen Franklin, Thorsten Huth, Trish Nolde, and Barbara Sawhill. Finally, many thanks to my family (especially my wife) who sacrificed to create time and space to allow me to work, uncannily phoned me when I needed support and encouragement, and pushed me, as they have for many years, to finish. v Abstract This dissertation seeks to broaden how researchers within Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) make sense of and examine psychological and power constructs at play in language courses conducted in 3D multiuser virtual environments. Eighteen students and two teachers in eight formal English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in the 3D multiuser virtual environment of Second Life participated in a discourse analysis study to explore the theoretical and analytic ways in which critical discursive psychology could function to explore how teaching and learning are performed as interactional events in a community of language teachers and learners in Second Life by investigating the use of interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions during these interactions and considering the implications of what is noticed. Transcriptions and field notes of screen recordings from the eight classes were the primary source of data. Findings drawn from the classes pointed to how the participants’ discursive practices worked to reframe orientations to pedagogical ideologies rhetorically, and how misunderstandings could be operationalized in ways divergent from their target language abilities. Broader implications of this research are then discussed, along with suggestions for teachers and researchers working within virtual environments, as well as desiderata for future research both from the findings shared and the data that was beyond the scope of this research. vi Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 Statement of the Problem ......................................................................................................... 4 Purpose of the Study ................................................................................................................. 5 Research Question .................................................................................................................... 6 Significance of the Study .......................................................................................................... 6 Theoretical or Conceptual Framework .................................................................................. 8 Limitations of the Study ........................................................................................................... 9 Delimitations ............................................................................................................................ 10 Definitions ................................................................................................................................ 12 Positionality Statement ........................................................................................................... 16 Organization of the Study ...................................................................................................... 18 Chapter Two: Review of the Literature .................................................................................... 21 Overview of the Chapter ........................................................................................................ 21 Search Methods ....................................................................................................................... 22 Section One: Review and Analysis of Selected Empirical Studies ..................................... 24 Theories of learning and their discontents. ........................................................................... 25 Summary and analysis. ......................................................................................................... 28 Multiuser virtual environments and CALL/SLA. ................................................................. 29 Second Life and affective states. ...................................................................................... 31 Second Life and interaction. ............................................................................................. 33 Second Life and the fallibility
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