Foreign Language Learning Under an Ecological–Enactive Approach

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.

Study at a glance

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.