Foreign Language Learning Under an Ecological–Enactive Approach
Languages February 26, 2026 Álvaro Monterroza Ríos, Olga Novikova, Juan Fernando Gomez-Paniagua
Learning a foreign language is not just acquiring internal grammar or vocabulary; it is a form of action that is situated and physically embodied within a social, material, and cultural environment from which new linguistic skills emerge. An ecological–enactive approach describes this as a coordination of two simultaneous processes: at the subpersonal level, the coordination of sensorimotor loops that adjust phonation, prosody, and auditory discrimination, and at the personal level, the organism–environment coupling guided by sociomaterial affordances that direct linguistic exploration. Active and immersive methodologies are more effective because they synchronize sensorimotor plasticity with the detection of affordances, allowing linguistic competence to emerge as progressive self-organization.