Interclass and Intercommunity Partnerships

Although virtually all institutions and regions include populations possessing heterogeneous linguistic and cultural resources that may be developmentally useful to one another, structurally linking them together for mutual benefit remains underutilized within L2 education.

An emerging class-to-class configuration is to link together local expert speakers, such as diaspora, immigrant, and heritage language populations, with foreign language (FL) students in organized partnerships. Blake and Zyzik (Reference Blake and Zyzik2003) used synchronous chat to connect Spanish heritage language students in a university language course with Spanish FL learners on the same campus. Benefits were reported for both groups. The FL learners gained access to interaction with more advanced speakers of Spanish, while the heritage speakers, many of whom had expressed insecurity about their Spanish language ability, that it was “not good enough” (Blake & Zyzik, Reference Blake and Zyzik2003, p. 540), occupied expert roles that helped to affirm their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Blake and Zyzik suggested that for both groups, Internet mediation decreased anxieties about negative appraisals of their linguistic performance, and correspondingly, that such “non-inhibiting” situations may tend to increase language output for both groups (p. 540).

Thorne (Reference Thorne, John, van Esch and Schalkwijk2004) examined an e-mail–mediated peer revision activity involving lower-intermediate students and more advanced Spanish foreign language students at the same university.Footnote ¹ The task called for the lower-intermediate students to assume the identity of a magazine editor whose column gives advice to teens about their problems, while the advanced students were to review the essays and provide comments on content and grammar as appropriate. Reflection surveys were distributed to both groups of students. From a total of 194 suggestions made by reviewers, 185 were incorporated into the rewritten essays, a ratio experienced language educators found to be very high. More interesting, however, were the responses to the reflection survey. The advanced learners described a sense of overall progress through retrospective insight into their near-past as novices and from the opportunity to temporarily occupy an expert subject-position vis-à-vis their knowledge of Spanish. The lower intermediate group received and incorporated grammatical assistance and, in select cases, reported to be motivated by interactions with proximally more advanced near-peers.

In assessing these two studies of interclass collaboration, the assistance provided to the students with lower language proficiency was constructive. The result for the more advanced students, however, is arguably more noteworthy. Palincsar and Brown (Reference Palincsar and Brown1984) term a switching around of student power positions in the classroom “reciprocal teaching,” where participants typically relegated to the discursively constrained student role gain the opportunity to occupy the structural role of an expert. This switch in subject positions shows the potential to provide insight into numerous aspects of the educational process. Additionally, for participants in the studies reviewed above, it made more visible to them their progress as developing language experts.

Developing Intercultural Awareness Through Conflict and Contradiction

Kramsch and Thorne (Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002) acknowledged that international communication is certainly made more rapid and accessible by global communication networks; attendant to this shift in modality, however, is the need to revise and expand conventional characterizations of face-to-face communicative competence (e.g., Breen & Candlin, Reference Breen and Candlin1980) to account for the genres and interactional dynamics enabled by Internet-mediation. In a study of French–American ICL2E, close analysis of e-mail exchanges illustrated that the French and American students were operating within, and thus expecting from the other, differing genres of communication. The French students employed a largely factual, academic, and dispassionate genre of writing that included supporting their positions with examples and the use of argument building logical connectors (“for example,” “however,” “moreover”). By contrast, the American students expected the dialogue to result in peer solidarity and mutual trust building. Especially in early phases of the project, the phatic style of the American postings, heavy with message elements seeking to build friendly rapport rather than information exchange, suggested a high degree of affective involvement and personal-emotional investment that, in the end, did not convert well to contentious academic argumentation. The two partner classes were operating on the orthogonal axes of communication as information exchange versus communication for personal engagement, forming what Bernstein (Reference Bernstein1996, p. 44) has termed a “potential discursive gap” that marks an opportunity for alternative possibilities and understandings. In the instance of this telecollaborative exchange, however, this gap was not adequately recognized until after the fact and so was not explored by students or instructors during the course; thus the potential of a transcultural learning community did not adequately form in this instance due largely to unexamined differences in communicative genre, expectation, and perceived purposes of the interaction.

In a recent study, Basharina (Reference Basharina2007) examined a triadic ICL2E project involving English learners from Japan, Mexico, and Russia. Utilizing activity theory (see Engeström, Reference Engeström, Engeström, Miettinen and Punamaki1999; Lantolf & Thorne, Reference Lantolf and Thorne2006; Leont'ev, Reference Leont'ev and Wertsch1981; Thorne & Lantolf, Reference Thorne, Lantolf, Makoni and Pennycook2007), this study identified a number of contradictions within the partnerships that catalyzed and mitigated the types of interaction that occurred. In particular, the curricular objectives and communication technologies made available clashed at pivotal points. Basharina drew upon the cultures-of-use framework (Thorne, Reference Thorne2003), in particular the proposition that historically sedimented qualities accrue to Internet communication tools through quotidian use and form an important axis along which to analyze cultural conflict, variation, and similarity. Basharina documented that the three groups varied in their use of online communication, and that more global cultural differences as well as differing expectations of appropriate online behavior created unresolved contradictions. Key issues were the use of formal versus informal registers of language, informationally dense messages versus personally situated narratives, the number and length of messages one could and should post, and whether extensive quotations (full paragraphs with minimal or no citations) counted as plagiarism. These intra-interactional disagreements were compounded by macrostructural differences in educational paradigms and varying socioeconomic status of the partner classes at local and nation state levels. Basharina concluded by calling for greater transparency at all levels of planning, more cross-site alignment in terms of the orientation of students to the processes of ICL2E, and stronger teacher mediation as an aid to interpreting and contributing messages (e.g., Belz & Müller-Hartmann, Reference Belz and Müller-Hartmann2003).

Schneider and von der Emde (Reference Schneider, von der Emde, Belz and Thorne2006) also addressed the issue of conflict and open disputation emerging within intercultural partnerships. In an exchange between the German students at Vassar College and students studying English at University of Münster, a significant conflict occurred during a discussion of two school shootings, one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and the other in Germany at the Johannes Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt. In response, rather than proposing strategies to either deal with or avoid conflict, Schneider and von der Emde described their development and use of a dialogic paradigm that helped to reframe such tensions as sites for intercultural exploration and learning. As part of their approach, they shifted away from the term communication, encumbered by its long association with communicative language teaching, and propose instead the Bakhtinian conception of dialogue, which characterizes language not as a unified system or resource for maintaining status quo semantics, but as a site of struggle (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1986). Their approach also involved situating telecollaborative partnerships in explicitly academic discourse such as ICL2E research to move students toward learning about the language and culture they are studying even in the face of conflict.

Related research such as that of Belz (Reference Belz2003), Ware and Kramsch (Reference Ware and Kramsch2005), and Ware (Reference Ware2005) have also helped to define specific methods for transforming unreflective intercultural conflict into developmentally available opportunities. Belz (Reference Belz2003) suggested focusing on “rich points” (Agar, Reference Agar1994) as they occur through close examinations of the minutia of lexical choice and subtle linguistic cues used to create social realities that influence the flow of communication and the qualities of relationship development (see also Toyoda & Harrison, Reference Toyoda and Harrison2002). Belz (Reference Belz2003) suggested that the pedagogical implication is not that students need necessarily change their discourse preferences, but that intercultural communicators would benefit from greater awareness of their own interactional style(s) and the development of heightened attunement to the communicative preferences of their interlocutors, perhaps even choosing to occupy positions of hybridity which may augment their interpretive capabilities as intercultural speakers who can navigate between multiple online and offline speech communities (for related work describing “shuttling” between languages and genres, see Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah2006).

The instructor has multiple roles when facilitating ICL2E projects, such as acting as a critical resource facilitating consciousness raising and modeling what Kramsch has described as an intercultural stance (Kramsch, Reference Kramsch and Vestergaard1999; Ware & Kramsch Reference Ware and Kramsch2005). More specifically, Belz (Reference Belz2003) described the complex role of the ICL2E educator: “the teacher in telecollaboration must be educated to discern, identify, explain, and model culturally-contingent patterns of interaction in the absence of paralinguistic meaning signals, otherwise it may be the case that civilizations ultimately do clash—in the empirical details of their computer-mediated talk” (pp. 92–93). In response to a number of missed opportunities for recontextualizing unexamined conflict in an ICL2E partnership, Ware (Reference Ware2005, p. 65) noted the need for moving beyond a narrow focus on the coconstruction of online discourse and toward meta-awareness of the construal of the broader online context of interaction. Put another way, an increasingly important function of the L2 teacher is “to prepare students to deal with global communicative practices that require far more than local communicative competence” (Kramsch & Thorne, Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002, p. 100).

Linguistic Gains as a Function of Interpersonal Relationships That Matter

The strength of meaningful intercultural partnerships also has had a hand to play in linguistic and pragmatic learning outcomes reported in ICL2E research. In a series of studies, Belz and Kinginger (Reference Belz and Kinginger2002, Reference Belz and Kinginger2003) and Kinginger and Belz (Reference Kinginger and Belz2005) described the development of address forms used in French and German (tu/vous and du/Sie, hereafter T/V). Nearly all of the American participants in these interactions exhibited free variation of T/V at the start of the intercultural communication process. Belz and Kinginger tracked usage over time in both e-mail and synchronous CMC sessions and found that after critical moments within exchanges with expert speakers, the American participants began to systemically modify their usage. These critical moments included explicit feedback and rationales for T form usage from German and French peers. Additionally, through the CMC discourse in which they were participating, the American students had opportunities to observe appropriate pronoun use by native speakers. In this way, pragmatic awareness of T/V as an issue led to the approximation of expert speaker norms in most cases. The critical insight emerging from Belz and Kinginger's research is that T/V use is not simply rule governed but is instead embedded in a system of meaning potentials that accrue over time and are realized in particular social interactions. Kinginger and Belz (Reference Kinginger and Belz2005) concluded that American students' desire to maintain positive face with German and French age-peers was the impulse focusing their attention toward the role of linguistic form in the performance of pragmatically appropriate communication, a condition that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to create within a conventional L2 classroom.

In related research, the social relationships built in these ICL2E partnerships have been shown consequential to the development of other grammatical and morphological features, namely da-compounds in German (Belz, Reference Belz2004, Reference Belz, Belz and Thorne2006), modal particles in German (Belz & Vyatkina, Reference Belz and Vyatkina2005; Vyatkina & Belz, Reference Vyatkina, Belz, Bardovi-Harlig, Félix-Brasdefer and Omar2006), and linguistic control in the use of overnull subjects and overall fluency in Spanish (Dussias, Reference Dussias, Belz and Thorne2006). The approach taken by Belz and Vyatkina in their various publications involved utilizing the ICL2E discourse of the students' own production as consciousness raising materials for the explicit teaching of contextually bound linguistic elements. German modal particles, for example, are frequently used and essential elements of interactive and interpersonal communication (Vyatkina, Reference Vyatkina2007). They are also, however, largely absent in formal instructional discourse, are polysemous, and do not have direct counter parts in English, all of which make modal particles difficult to teach effectively. Through iterative cycles of awareness and production tasks that drew upon intercultural CMC discourse the learners had directly participated in, the frequency, distribution, and accuracy of the students' use of modal particle came to approach that of the native speakers they were interacting with (Vyatkina, Reference Vyatkina2007; Vyatkina & Belz, Reference Vyatkina, Belz, Bardovi-Harlig, Félix-Brasdefer and Omar2006).

In contrast to approaches to L2 education that focus predominantly on language in relative isolation from its use in interpersonal interaction, ICL2E emphasizes participation in intercultural dialogue and development of the linguistic and metacommunicative resources necessary for carrying out such processes. This suggests that part of what language education could involve is the creation of conditions that support the development of significant social relationships between persons who have been socialized into different languacultural viewpoints. The ICL2E research reviewed here indicates that when personal relationships matter, academic treatments of grammar and pragmatics attain renewed relevance in the lives of speakers.

Structured Participation in Open Internet Environments

The use of open Internet environments such as message boards and chat forums has a lengthy history within L2 education. Cononelos and Oliva (Reference Cononelos and Oliva1993) provided an early account of a content-based Italian foreign language course in which students participated in Italian language newsgroup discussions. The interaction with native speakers was reported to be intimidating at times, but also compelling in terms of producing authentic contexts for expression. The experience also galvanized the students into a mutually supportive community in that students came to rely upon one another, as much or more than the instructor, for editorial assistance in the production of messages.

In a more recent study, Hanna and de Nooy (Reference Hanna and de Nooy2003) reported on four students of French who participated in public Internet discussion fora associated with the Parisian newspaper Le Monde. Hanna and de Nooy's rationale for opting to use public discussion fora, rather than more conventional approaches such as telecollaboration partnerships or tandem learning, was to move students entirely outside of the relative safety of explicitly educational interactions where participants occupy the institutionally bounded subject position of student or learner. Le Monde discussion fora, by contrast, exist to support argumentation and debate about mostly contemporary political and cultural issues. Hanna and de Nooy followed four students, two of whom opened with stand-alone messages that requested help to improve their French. They received a few cordial as well as abrupt replies, each of which suggested the need to take a position in the ongoing discussion. Neither did, and both disappeared from the forum. In contrast, the other two students opened with a response to an existing message, directly entering the ongoing debates. One student primarily used English in his posts, but with coaching and support from other participants, he maintained a presence on the forum, suggesting that “neither politeness nor linguistic accuracy is the measure of intercultural competence here” (Hanna & de Nooy, Reference Hanna and de Nooy2003, p. 78). Rather, in the circumstances of the Le Monde discussion fora, participation in the genre of debate was the minimum threshold for continued participation. From an instructional perspective, encouraging students to participate in noneducationally oriented online communities would involve coaching them to recognize contingent and often localized cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools. This could include developing awareness of appropriate genres of language use and patterns and styles of participation with the goal of gaining the capacity to contribute to ongoing discussions in ways that do not ultimately privilege “the self . . . as the exotic little foreigner/the other” (Hanna & de Nooy, Reference Hanna and de Nooy2003, p. 73).

Emerging Literacy Practices

A great deal of research informed by the New Literacy Studies (NLS) tradition (e.g., Bazerman, Reference Bazerman1989; Gee, Reference Gee1992, Reference Gee1996; Street, Reference Street1995) has clear implications for current understandings of literacy and language learning as socially and culturally situated, shaped by context, and mediated by various tools and technologies. The NLS notion of multiple literacies, whereby learners develop literacy skills “through multiple experiences, in multiple contexts, with multiple text genres (both oral and written), for multiple purposes” (Kern, Reference Kern1995, p. 67) is especially relevant to explorations of language practices taking place in out-of-school, online settings. Moreover, the concept of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, Reference Cope and Kalantzis2000; New London Group, 1996) has been particularly helpful for exploring communicative contexts where networked information and communication technologies enable globally distributed individuals to connect using multiple languages and forms of semiotic mediation. Many of these new literacy practices, such as text messaging, e-mail, chat, and communication via avatar, to name just a few, extend beyond traditional print-based text.

Much of the scholarship in this area has focused on native speakers using English and other forms of semiotic representation to engage in (potentially new) varieties of literate interaction in online environments. For example, Lankshear & Knobel (Reference Lankshear and Knobel2003, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2006) reviewed a range of new language and literacy practices associated with remixing or the “practice of taking cultural artifacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend” (Lankshear & Knobel, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2006, p. 106). Many types of remixing have arguably become common “writing” practices for a number of youth in online fan communities (Lessig, Reference Lessig2005, cited in Lankshear & Knobel, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2006). For example, fanfiction is a practice by which fans of various media such as books, movies, television, comics, and video games borrow elements of these popular cultural texts, such as characters, settings, and plotlines, to name just a few, to construct their own narrative fictions. Fans often remix these various media, combining multiple genres (e.g., creating a “crossover” in which the fiction “crosses over” between a movie and a book), languages, and cultural elements such as inserting Japanese terms and Asian cultural references into Japanese animation or anime-based fanfiction written in English and set within a North American story context. Remix practices can also illustrate a plurality of registers, for instance, alterations between formal narrative prose and online social registers (Black, Reference Black2005; Lankshear & Knobel, Reference Lankshear and Knobel2006). Lankshear and Knobel also explored other forms of digital remixing that include the production of anime music videos (AMVs) (combining video and popular music), fan-produced translations and subtitling (combining video, image, and text), and creating amateur manga and/or fan art (combining image and text). Other research has explored how youth use language and new technologies strategically to strengthen social bonds and articulate their identities in online zine and journal communities (Guzzetti & Gamboa, Reference Guzzetti and Gamboa2005; Lankshear & Knobel, 2002), fan sites (Alvermann & Hagood, Reference Alvermann and Hagood2000), and through social networks constructed and maintained via instant messaging (Grinter & Palen, Reference Grinter and Palen2002; Lewis & Fabos, Reference Lewis and Fabos2005; Shiu & Lenhart, Reference Shiu and Lenhart2004) as they develop “digital” literacies (Alvermann, Reference Alvermann2002) articulating with established and emergent cultures-of-use of these Internet communication tools.

Of late, there also has been increasing attention paid to the many online literate exchanges taking place in multiple languages, particularly in communities that coalesce around popular and youth culture. For example, Lam's (Reference Lam2000, Reference Lam2004, Reference Lam2006) work has explored how the Internet provides new, transnational contexts for immigrant youth's English identity development and language socialization. In an early study, Lam (Reference Lam2000) described Almon, an immigrant from Hong Kong, who had struggled with English, been tracked as a low-achieving student, and expressed significant trepidation about English, the language of his new home in the United States. In high school, however, he began to explore the Internet, developed a Web site devoted to the Japanese pop (J-pop) singer Ryoko, and used his knowledge of Japanese popular culture, Web design skills, and chat and e-mail to create a textual identity in English. This process was mediated largely in English but also included transcultural expressive features such as emoticons, Web page design, and elements from other languages (e.g., Chinese). The online medium, coupled with his developing textual identity, bolstered Almon's confidence in communicating with a supportive, transnational group of peers who shared his interests in popular culture. Moreover, these exchanges also helped him to shift “from a sense of alienation from the English language in his adopted country to a newfound sense of expressivity and solidarity when communicating in English with his Internet peers” (p. 468).

Commenting on the differences between Almon's developmental progress in English in school and in the Internet peer group, Lam and Kramsch (Reference Lam, Kramsch, Leather and van Dam2003) argued that although Almon's textual identity on the Internet was a positive and empowering discursive formation, his position in the U.S. high school “is also symbolically constructed, this time as a low-pride ‘low-achiever’” (p. 155). In other words, as Lam and Kramsch noted, the sophisticated genre of English language use Almon demonstrated online may not meet the selection criteria necessary to pass the high school exit composition test. This case presents a number of challenges to the conventional goals and processes of language education, such as the rigidity of the gate-keeping mechanisms of high-stakes testing, the disconnect between the prescriptivist epistemology of schooling and language use that is appropriate in other contexts (Internet-mediated and otherwise), and what should or could be done to leverage, and perhaps formally acknowledge, a plurality of communicative practices that are currently considered stigmatized linguistic varieties. In an age marked by transcultural and hybrid genres of communication, these issues will increase in intensity and complexity and must necessarily inform the L2 educational frameworks of the future.

In a more recent study, Lam (Reference Lam2004) described how Yu Qing and Tsu Ying, two adolescent Chinese emigrants to the United States, participated in a Chinese–English chat room and used a hybrid form of English and Romanized Chinese to represent their identities as bilinguals. According to Lam, the hybrid or mixed-code variety of English became an integral part of establishing and maintaining a collective ethnic identity for members of this community—an identity that followed “neither the social categories of English-speaking Americans nor those of Cantonese-speaking Chinese” (p. 45). Such code-switching was also used for rhetorical purposes such as expressing humor, relationships, and social roles within the community. Lam's analysis highlights how the online culture of hybrid language use allowed these teens, who felt marginalized from their native English-speaking as well as native-born Chinese American peers in school, to develop confidence and fluency interacting with a transnational group of youth in English.

Yi's (in press; Reference Yi2007) work explores the multiliterate practices of generation 1.5, Korean American youth in an online community called Welcome to Buckeye City (WTBC). Drawing from ethnographic and case study data, Yi described how this community served as a “safe house” (Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah1997) for these youth to use their L1 of Korean and L2 of English to socialize, compose, relax, and discuss problems from their daily lives. A unique activity on WTBC was relay writing, whereby members of the site compose a portion of an evolving story and then “relay” the text to the next author (Yi, in press). Much like the role-play writing of fanfiction authors (Black, in press; Thomas, Reference Thomas2005), this collaborative form of writing “moves beyond the common emphasis on research into individual composing in cyberspace and puts a new face on voluntary literacy practices, one that involves students coconstructing knowledge and understanding in a community setting” (Yi, in press, p. 4). By writing with partners and in groups, these youth are able to engage in purposeful, composition-related interactions, develop metacognitive strategies for monitoring their language use, and gain insight into the social nature of writing (Black, in press).

Yi's case study analysis of Joan, a generation 1.5, Korean American high school student in the United States, reveals how Joan was able to use a wide range of multiliterate composing practices to develop what Yi calls a “writerly” identity in the WTBC community (personal communication, May 15, 2007). Joan's prolific writing of poems, short stories, cards, notes, relay novels, e-mails, and instant messages provided her with opportunity to take on subtly different identity roles according to the social and composing settings. By publicly posting her poetry on WTBC, Joan was also able to receive feedback from other members of the site. This feedback served the multiple purposes of helping Joan to improve her composing skills, enabling her to discuss her “adolescent thoughts and feelings” with other immigrant youth, and affirming her identity as an accomplished poet. Additionally, Joan's frequent instant messaging, chatting, and e-mailing helped her to develop confidence and fluency in “conversational” English and biliterate writing (Yi, Reference Yi2007).

Black's (Reference Black2005, Reference Black2006, Reference Black, Knobel and Lankshear2007) empirical investigation of an online fanfiction site also centers on the multilingual composing practices of English language learner (ELL) youth. Drawing from a 3-year ethnographic project, Black presented case studies of ELL youth of Asian heritage participating in a Japanese animation (anime) fanfiction writing community. In this work, Black highlighted how the cosmopolitan nature of anime-based fanfiction enabled some ELL focal participants to act as cultural and linguistic “consultants” within the community by helping other fanfiction writers accurately incorporate elements of Asian cultures and languages into their story texts (Black, Reference Black2005). Akin to Lam's Reference Lam2004 study, Black also found that many ELL youth used Romanized Chinese to compose hybrid or multilingual fanfiction texts that incorporated their L1 of Mandarin, L2 of English, and at times additional languages such as Japanese and French. These hybrid texts provided a means for case study participants to index their identities as multilingual and multicultural youth (Black, Reference Black2006) and participate via valued language practices that emerged within this specific fandom-inspired speech community.

An additional focus of Black's work is the many ways that online fanfiction-related activity is aligned with school-sanctioned literacy and language development practices, such as collaborative composition, peer-review, peer-editing, and mentoring (Black, Reference Black, Knobel and Lankshear2007). For example, Black described how the ease of online publication made it possible for Nanako, a 16 year-old Mandarin-Chinese high school student who immigrated to Canada at age 11, to revise and repost her fanfiction texts in accordance with audience feedback on textual elements such as plot, characterization, and grammar (Black, Reference Black, Knobel and Lankshear2007). Like many fanfiction authors, Nanako also utilized community resources such as online writing guides, composition forums, as well as generic examples from other fanfiction authors to familiarize herself with the associated techniques and conventions of different genres of writing (Black, Reference Black2005). In these ways, Nanako was able to not only improve her English writing skills but also take on the identity of a popular and accomplished fanfiction author with a broad following of readers. Thus, a common thread across Black's, Lam's, and Yi's work is how online communities provide ELL youth with new forums for taking on powerful authorial and social roles, even as they learn and develop fluency with multiple textual forms, languages, and online registers.

Virtual Environments and Gaming

Although not explicitly interactive with other players, a recent report described L2 learning relevant uses of off-the-shelf machine local gaming. A best-selling example is The Sims 2, a game available in multiple languages that simulates the routine, and even the mundane, activities of everyday life. In an informal assessment of The Sims 2 as a foreign language learning tool, Purushotma (Reference Purushotma2005) found that the vocabulary and tasks the game comprises were highly aligned with the content of conventional foreign language course content. Purushotma argued that the difference between instructed foreign language learning and a game like The Sims is that exposure to the target language is always linked to carrying out tasks and social actions, which concomitantly embeds vocabulary and grammatical constructions in rich associative contexts.

Increasingly, multiplayer online games and virtual environments are coming to the attention of education researchers and practitioners (for a review, see Squire, Reference Squire2003; see also Steinkuehler, Reference Steinkuehler2006). They have been argued to provide opportunities for immersion in linguistic, cultural, and task-based settings (Gee, Reference Black2004).Footnote ² An array of literacy practices have recently emerged that are associated with massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), video games played online in a persistent virtual world in which individuals interact with other players, not only through voice and in-game chat screens but also via digital characters called avatars. Such research has focused on the function and social norms governing the use of “4337 speak” or “leetspeak” meaning “elite speak,” a specialized form of in-game writing utilizing alphanumeric characters that is used by experienced players (Black & Steinkuehler, in press; Steinkuehler, Reference Steinkuehler2006). Additionally, research has detailed how language and other in-game symbols are used to develop strong “projective” identities, defined as a long-term and usually consistent identity performances players project onto their in-game characters (Gee, Reference Gee2004). Cultures promoting explicit assistance are also common in MMOs and instances describing how experienced players scaffold newbies, or novices, into successful participation are emerging (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, Reference Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell and Moore2007; Nardi, Ly, & Harris, Reference Nardi, Ly and Harris2007; Squire & Steinkuehler, Reference Squire, Steinkuehler, Gibbs and Krause2006).

The most popular MMO at the time of this writing (June 2007) is World of Warcraft (or WoW, produced by Blizzard Entertainment), which currently has a customer base of over 8.5 million worldwide. WoW is a graphically elaborate and visually elegant online realm that supports voice and text propositions from game-generated characters. Human gamers can act on the environment and with other human and game-generated characters and can communicate with one another using an in-game multichannel synchronous chat tool as well as with an asynchronous mail application (see Nardi et al., Reference Nardi, Ly and Harris2007).

In a forthcoming study examining a multilingual encounter in World of Warcraft (hereafter WoW), Thorne described an impromptu dialogue between two gamers, one American and the other Ukrainian. Both were battling computer-generated foes in the same area, when Zomn, the Ukrainian, sent the following message to Meme, the American: “ti russkij slychajno?”, to which Meme replied with a question mark and a follow-up question asking which language Zomn is using (the reply was Russian). Approximately 150 lines of dialogue follow that begin with introductions and statements of location. Early in the conversation, the American Meme contacted a Ukrainian high school friend using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to ask how to say something appropriate in Russian. This overlapping use of multiple information and communication tools, very common among sophisticated Internet users (and particularly youth, see Thorne & Payne, Reference Thorne and Payne2005) is a representative example of what Jones (Reference Jones, Levine and Scollon2004) described as polyfocality–the use of multiple semiotic resources in near simultaneity. Periodically throughout the roughly 30 minutes of play together, Meme would post Russian language messages received through AIM from his Ukrainian hometown friend, some of which were humorously vulgar. Zomn reacted with good-natured responses and, in turn, asked specific questions about the accuracy of the English he was using in his posts.

From a language-learning perspective, the conversation was naturally occurring and unconstrained by the fabricated (if also developmentally useful) patterns characterizing much instructed setting discourse. The matrix language for this interaction was English, but three languages (including one instance of a Latin aphorism) were used in total. The transcript illustrated reciprocal alternations in expert–novice status wherein both participants provided language-specific explicit corrections, made requests for linguistic assistance, and collaboratively assembled successful repair sequences. From an ethnomethodological perspective, the social order assembled by this dyad illustrates significant opportunities for both producing new knowledge and refining existing knowledge in the areas of language use (English for Zomn and Russian for Meme) as well as WoW associated game strategy. Finally, an enduring social bond was established (they added one another to an in-game “friends” list) that pertained to continued intragame activity as well as to out-of-game social networks. In an uncorroborated but interesting follow-up to this episode, during an informal conversation with the American student, he mentioned a strong interest in studying Russian, in part to improve his WoW experience with Russian speakers. He also reported that another student in his dorm, a highly enthusiastic gamer, had already begun to study Chinese with the primary goal of more fully participating in Chinese language-mediated game play (Thorne, in press).

In the research discussed earlier relating to emerging Internet environments, gaming, and new media literacies, a unifying theme is that the social accomplishment of language development was not an end in itself. Rather, the desire to build expressive capacity was driven by its use value as a resource for creating and maintaining social relationships that are meaningful in the participants' lives. In this sense, certain developmental trajectories occurring in informal learning environments may only be possible in self-selected activity marked by the establishment of relatively egalitarian, and situationally plastic, participation structures. Research on learning in noninstitutionalized digital environments is in its relative infancy. Further research is needed that finely documents what Brouwer and Wagner (Reference Brouwer and Wagner2004) described as “collections of phenomenological similarity” that serve as resources for the construction of “intersubjective meaning in social life” (p. 31). Future work in this area should help to highlight the evolving contours of possibility for language development in the transcultural spaces of noninstitutional online environments and associated cultures-of-use.