Traces of Interaction : Designing for everyday encounters in a second language

Sammanfattning

For an adult migrant, learning a second language happens alongside the everyday work of moving through a new city: the supermarket, the bus stop, the parent-teacher meeting. Existing second-language-in-the-wild programmes have long recognised the importance of these encounters and built materials to support them. This thesis argues that the surroundings of such encounters, including the room, the objects at hand, and the prior knowledge a newcomer brings, can themselves be designed for, and have rarely been treated that way. Language is the medium of these moments; the social participation underneath them is what the design is built around. The thesis proposes a teacher-operated activity cycle for adult language classes, running in three phases: preparation, experience, and reflection. The cycle is supported by four pieces: a modular city map, a set of physical and digital markers, a teacher manual, and a webpage. At the close of each cycle, every student leaves a trace of their experience: a photograph and a short clue, made in one moment, for another student who will arrive at the same place later. The traces build up over time. Each new cohort starts from what the cohort before them left behind. The thesis makes two contributions. The first is to treat the surroundings of everyday second-language encounters as an object of interaction design in their own right, separate from the linguistic content the encounters are usually framed around. The second is to propose cross-cohort continuity as one way that a mediating system can outlast any single teacher, cohort, or designer.