Foreign Language Learning Under an Ecological–Enactive Approach

Summary

Learning a foreign language is not just acquiring internal rules but is a form of action situated and embodied in a social, material, and cultural environment. Under an ecological–enactive approach, this involves two simultaneous processes: at the subpersonal level, coordination of sensorimotor loops for phonation, prosody, and auditory discrimination; at the personal level, organism–environment coupling guided by sociomaterial affordances. Active and immersive methodologies are more effective because they synchronize sensorimotor plasticity with affordance detection, allowing linguistic competence to emerge through self-organization.

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Abstract

This article argues that learning a foreign language cannot be understood solely as the acquisition of internal grammatical or lexical rules, but rather as a form of action situated and corporeally embodied in a social, material, and cultural environment from which new linguistic skills emerge. Hence, we propose to describe foreign language learning under an ecological–enactive approach to cognition, that is, a coordination of two simultaneous multilevel processes: (i) at the subpersonal level, as the coordination of sensorimotor loops that adjust phonation, prosody, and auditory discrimination, and (ii) at the personal level, as the organism–environment coupling led by sociomaterial affordances that guide linguistic exploration. We conclude that active and immersive methodologies are more effective because they synchronize sensorimotor plasticity with the detection of affordances, enabling linguistic competence to emerge as a progressive self-organization of the agent–world system.

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