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.

While consumer culture theory (CCT) has contributed to establishing the cultural grounding of consumer experience it has not emphasized to the same extent the role of embodiment in shaping experience. Indeed culture plays a significant role in shaping bodily habits, skills, practices and our interactions with the environment, but such embodied skills do not restrict and limit the range of meaning and experiences that we can experience. Taking this perspective, the present paper attempts to argue for the creative power of this embodied dimension. More specifically, consumer experience is viewed as a body-world interplay, as affordance-responsiveness in and to a social, cultural and material environment the outcome of which cannot be defined in advance. Whereas CCT has tended to regard the body as the target of culture and discourse, an embodied approach highlights how the body is also the locus of new expressions, meaning and new experiences. The paper ends with discussions, implications and suggestions for further studies.