Linguistic Affordances in Small Group Work in a Videoconferencing-mediated English Class at College

The present study analyzed small group interaction in the videoconferencing-mediated English class at a university in South Korea. Adopting the ‘affordance’ construct (van Lier, 2004) as a conceptual framework for interpreting small group work, the goals of the research are to 1) identify the types of linguistic affordances emerging in videoconferencing-mediated small group work and 2) examine learners’ perceptions and responses to the linguistic affordances. Data were collected from two major sources: 40 video recording files of small group observation and post-class interviews with four students. The paper analyzed 13 extracts selected from the transcription of the video recordings. The overall results of the research suggest that a range of linguistic affordances emerged through interaction and participants responded to the affordances they perceived in various ways. Three types of linguistic affordances were observed in the data: technology-generated affordances, learner-generated affordances, and learner-to-learner-generated affordances. The study findings have important implications for providing new insights into the operationalization of the affordance construct as well as advancing the understanding of the affordance perspective of L2 learning.