An ecological psychology perspective in teaching Chinese online

3.1.1.1 Situating online learning in a physical environment

Situating online learning in a physical environment means that we design activities to engage students holistically—mind, body, and physical surroundings. In a physical classroom, students can move around to do pair work and group work; they can touch, smell, and manipulate objects while completing tasks. In a typical synchronous online class, however, students’ bodies are usually “glued” to chairs, and their eyes are fixed on the computer screen. The online “classroom” encapsulated in Zoom-like technologies is reduced to an enclosed space inside an electronic device. Ecological psychology informs us of the significance of the interconnectivity of mind, body, and physical space. To connect to the body and resources in physical surroundings, teachers can start with material things. When teaching numbers in a synchronous setting, for instance, a short scavenger hunt may light up young learners’ curiosity: In 3 min, each student finds 3–5 objects at home and counts them in Chinese. One student can hold up their items on screen for another student to count and summarize. When teaching self-introduction, students can introduce their pets or family members with the presence of the pet or the family member, connecting to different homes across space. When talking about shopping, the teacher and students can show an item from their closet, discuss its price and style, and ask questions about each other’s items – where it was purchased, and whether or not it was a gift. As a follow-up, students can focus on one shared item, find a similar product online, and do a comparison.

An embodied experience can also be constructed within the local or global community. Teachers can assign offline homework that asks their students to walk around their city and share their experiences going grocery shopping in video recordings or take pictures of their favorite hangout spots and show them to their class. Using Flip to record videos in their own time, college students in our Chinese class gave directions on how to get somewhere by describing the route while physically walking and turning inside their house or in the neighborhood. The activity was designed to connect students with each other and with resources in the environments. The physical aspect was effective in consolidating the two grammatical patterns (1) “先xiān, first, 然后 rán hòu, then, 最后 zuì hòu, finally” and (2) “往 … 拐 wǎng … guǎi, towards … turn.” For a different task, the students shared a video clip of their neighborhoods and described the weather on the day of filming. As the students lived in different places with different weathers on this specific day, the scenery varied, and the verbal descriptions diversified. Following this activity, the students initiated a conversation on social media and shared with each other their likes and dislikes of weathers and seasons in Chinese. The most important thing to keep in mind is that online learning does not mean all learning occurs on the screen, it can be distributed to a larger learning environment, online or offline activities, where learners can find and make meaning and take actions; and across time.

3.1.1.2 Creating activities with potentials to engage perception-action cycles

Human perception is invariably linked to acting upon the world. The activities that engage students the most are those that generate ongoing perception-action cycles or affordance networks. A Chinese food cooking activity can be turned into an ongoing cycle of activity. For instance, when making Chinese stir-fried tomatoes and eggs, students follow recipes to read instructions and cook at the same time, add vegetable oil among various ingredients, pour it into the pan, find scallions, add them to the pan, and so forth. As can be seen, this series of actions can be considered one large perception cycle of cooking. If the activity stops here, students only practice vocabulary related to ingredients and the action of making the dish. However, if the design is informed by generating a perception-action cycle, the instructor can help students to engage in ongoing meaningful actions, such as learning about the nutrient value of the dish, which region this cuisine is typical of, why it is so popular, and so on. A third part can be sharing the activity, which includes taking a video of the cooking process or pictures to share on social media. The three or four large cycles together can offer a holistic experience of Chinese food cooking. Therefore, students can find their own ecological niche in the affordance networks of the cycles.

Activities with potentials to engage perception-action cycles can also be implemented asynchronously. There should be potentials for others to act upon and continue the activity. The cycle of perception and action draws on affordances. The richer the environment, the more complex the action, and the more impactful the learning result might be (van Lier, 2004; Zheng et al., 2018). In language learning, affordance is the possibility for action that creates opportunities for active engagement and participation (van Lier, 2004). Reed (1996) emphasizes that affordances should not be seen as stimuli as they are objective facts as opposed to subjective constructions of the mind. He further characterizes affordances of an ecosystem as opportunities for action. Along this line, teaching material should be designed to support diverse action-taking possibilities, and language activities should invite an ongoing cycle of perception-action. To reach this optimal learning experience, teachers can start with daily teaching materials. For example, the use of stuffed animals (e.g., panda, dragon) is popular in elementary school Chinese classes. However, it can be challenging to sustain the effect of a stuffed animal. It is not uncommon that students were highly enchanted by a plush but lost interest after a few classes. To create new affordance and maintain students’ interest and encourage creativity, teachers may think along the line of contextualizing the panda or dragon in a storytelling activity that may evoke imagination in a follow-up writing activity. This continuation from reading (or hearing) a story to writing one on their own or with others, is called Xu (“续 xù”), a Chinese word with a composite meaning “completion, extension and creation,” proposed by Wang (2016). Many studies used variations of Xu hypothesis (e.g., Zhang & Zhang, 2021) have shown positive effects on learning gains and affective development. The stuffed animals can be activated to be sick due to lack of food. This can trigger real-world events taking place in virtual field trips. In light of ecological role play (Caselli et al., 2023), Students can act as a vet, or a biological scientist to find out how they would solve the problem by using digital resources, such as watching a documentary movie assigned by the teacher or finding their own movies online.

3.2.1.1 Designing complex, flexible and dynamic activities

To attune new intentions, our work responds to the pandemic or post pandemic online language education urgency by introducing the design of online instruction and making suggestions to help enact complex, flexible, and dynamic activities. Design-based researchers, Sasha Barab, Kurt Squire, Julio Rodriguez, Thomas Reeves, find that this design principle allows for individuating and incorporating each student’s intentions and capabilities dynamically. What makes an activity complex and flexible is usually it being “ill-defined” (Ozverir et al., 2017). In “ill-defined” activities, students are invited to create and define activities themselves and complete them in a sustainable period of time. An “ill-defined” activity thus allows individuals to find meaning and relevance in the whole environment. Furthermore, adding dynamicity to the picture students can enact things and events relevant to them in the process of dynamic coupling. Resources become specific affordances for each person in their unique trajectories.

The use of a thematically organized curriculum in STARTALK programs illustrates this idea. For example, STARTALK program themes like “A musical journey to China,” “My world,” and “Let’s go somewhere” give students many opportunities to explore, create, and contribute (STARTALK, 2022). Similarly, in a semester-long creative writing project, CFL college students in an online beginners’ class completed a writing product under the theme “An adventure” (Paul & Haq, 2022). During this project, students worked cumulatively to complete a four-chapter story by writing a chapter after each of the four lessons studied. Students came up with various topics reflecting personal interests, and their final products varied, including paper books, e-books, comic strips, digital storytelling, and YouTube videos. Through collaboration with peers, new intentions emerged, such as from writing dialogues purely for the assignment to designing a digital book as a gift for a friend.

3.2.1.2 Providing scaffolding for attunement

Young (2004) views learning as “education of intention and attention” (p. 172), or attunement. Drawing learner’s attention to relevant information is best done by providing scaffolds, namely, to narrow the distance between the novice and experts (Vygotsky, 1978). With time, the intensity of the scaffolds, will fade away with careful dynamic evaluation of the learning progress. Learners, with time, become more equipped to detect useful information themselves. Thus, they become more independent learners who are able to actively seek support and resources and embody new skills in their practices and actual events in life and work.

Providing instruction and materials that are in service of scaffolding is necessary for complex and flexible activities. For teaching Chinese online, we emphasize social scaffolding. Social scaffolding refers to “the processes by which co-regulated exchanges with other persons direct development in novel directions” (Mascolo, 2005, p. 188). In teaching Chinese online, it refers to the scaffolding process between the student and the more experienced. The lowest level of social scaffolding includes a minimum amount of online support from the teacher. The highest level of social scaffolding involves “different forms of concurrent modelings and imitation” (Mascolo, 2005, p. 189). The latter can be seen as the interaction between a novice and an expert in a video game, such as an L2 English learner and a native English speaker completing quests together in the World of Warcraft (Newgarden et al., 2015), or a group of CFL learners and a native Chinese speaker decorating a room cooperatively in a Virtual China world (Zheng et al., 2017). Here we suggest that the concept of attunement can be especially useful when dealing with different levels of social scaffolding. Attunement, an ecological concept, refers to a gradual nudging between two interactants on a metaphorical device, called Intentional Spring, which can be imagined to vividly describe the notion of dynamic relationship. Ecological psychological researchers also use such a metaphorical device further the relationship to be reciprocal in that the role of expert and novice can be interchangeable at any given moment or task of interaction (Young, 2004; Zheng et al., 2009). When the teacher or the more expert learner nudges the more novice learner to move to a new cycle, the attunement can encourage the learner to say something she has never said before, and more importantly, it can allow the novice learner to look up a word or detect patterns of language used in the attunement and imitate an utterance with creativity. Zheng et al. (2009) find that attunement is common in open-ended quest-driven activities between native and non-native speaker’s problem-solving activities. On the Intentional Spring, the native speaker does not act as an input provider, but an agent on one side of the intentional spring, nudging the intention of the non-native speaker who therefore takes actions on the other side of the device (see Figure 1 in Zheng et al., 2009, p. 493). Depending on the nature of the task and the non-native speaker’s agency, the non-native speaker assumes the role of an expert and nudges the native speaker to attune to the non-native speaker’s culture and take appropriate actions.

Regardless of the level of scaffolding, students have to feel safe in online environments in which making mistakes or saying something inaccurately would not have any negative consequences. Instead, making mistakes is considered as normal while learners are tinkering the most appropriate expression, right tense, or grammatical structure. We encourage teachers to treat students not as input receivers, but persons embodied with a unique repertoire of knowledge and resources, which can be turned into affordances for supporting their own agentic actions. Teachers should also act as mobilizers who welcome and adapt technological resources inside and outside of the classroom to sustain dynamic and reciprocal relationships. A more experienced someone can be a peer, a tutor, a parent, or an active social media participant. There are many more resources in the learning ecosystem to be deployed. When appropriate, we encourage teachers to include a volunteer, a learner from a more advanced class, or a Chinese-speaking parent in class activities.

3.3.1.1 Allowing for care-taking of oneself, each other, and the environment

Meaning-making and values-realizing are essential throughout all of human life and strongly interlinked with culture. One integral part of teaching language is teaching mindful action-taking according to careful and on-the-fly evaluation of surrounding materials and artifacts based on dynamic situations and their respective ecological niches – people need to balance social solidarity with striving for success, figure out which values to act on as the one they want to work towards, and which language to use with each individual action in each individual situation. From this perspective, language teaching needs to offer opportunities for learners to experience these ever-changing situations. Students cannot merely solve predefined and sequenced tasks. In order to offer values-realizing opportunities meaningful to the students, we encourage teachers to incorporate unscripted conversations in relation to the immediate environment and participants present. While students might be hesitant at first, they will learn to negotiate meaning and take action, which builds their trust in the process of emergence.

Along this line, activities are designed to help students take action at their own pace, based on their own interests, or others’ interests if it is a collaborative project, for example. The learners should be encouraged to take initiatives to research material on their own, and create their projects and activities, deemed rich and open. Projects should leave space for students to explore their values and encourage them to think about and reflect on their actions and consequences. While this can be guided by the teacher into different directions, the learners will take action in finding, formulating, questioning, and realizing dynamic values, which will sustain students to become empowered learners (Barab et al., 2019). Project-based learning has shown to be effective in promoting language learning for a sustainable period of time (Stoller & Myers, 2019). The three discussed principles of ecological psychology add to project-based and problem-based learning by encouraging these two types of teaching to have more “ill-defined” instructions, allowing for individual values-realizing, and the inclusion of the whole environment as the source from which meaningful communication emerges.

3.3.1.2 Cultivating curiosity and mindfulness for values-realizing and individual meaning-making

These types of activities also cultivate curiosity and mindfulness for the learner. Thinking emerges from involvement with what is around, the involvement being characterized by various values-realizing processes. In order to help students to value participation, the activity needs something the students care about as a driving factor to make mindful decisions. When learning Chinese, some students might want to learn how to communicate with or talk about their family and friends, and other students might want to focus more on the environment, politics, or animals. Meaning-making in these cases would result from dynamic negotiation, and personal as well as collaborative values-realizing. If students can brainstorm and take action in the areas that they care about, such as helping out a friend who is struggling, supporting local farmers, participating in or organizing a campaign about a problem – which can all be turned into classroom activities – following Hodges et al. (2012), they might be able to act according to their own dynamic and situational goals, values, and what they want to achieve in every given situation.