An ecological community becoming: Language learning as first-order experiencing with place and mobile technologies

This work looks at how language learners' experiential engagement with place is achieved through design. It proposes a new language learning model, one that emerges through the availability and support of mobile technologies, and in which semiotic resources and learners' participation in and experience of events are central. In this model, language learning is languaging in place, where place is a 3D holographic experience. Within such place and through such experience, knowing co-arises with design, place-based interactive experiences with others, and through mobile game narrative. The findings also suggest experiencing events together creates community, one that is emergent, dynamic, place-making and ecological in nature. Drawing on the constraints and affordances of community gives rise to linguistic choices and skilled linguistic action. By employing an eclectic toolkit from multimodal analysis, cognitive event analysis, and communicative project, we describe our mobile game design and describe our analysis of the game playing process to explain how we conceptualize the relationship between language learning, place, events and mobile technologies.