Guðrún Theodórsdóttir - The Icelandic Village

Full Title: The Icelandic Village: Guided Participation in Real-Life Interaction in Icelandic

Guðrún Theodórsdóttir, PhD - This paper presents a ground-breaking scaffolding L2 pedagogy that brings participants’ everyday practices in the wild to the core of language learning and teaching. Known as the Icelandic Village, the project has designed an environment for L2 interaction outside the classroom; a bridge between classroom interaction and real life interaction. The Icelandic Village is a network of businesses in downtown Reykjavik and/or on the campus of the University of Iceland (in Reykjavik) where L2 learners of Icelandic are offered an opportunity to participate in interaction with local Icelanders on a daily basis in everyday life situations such as doing business in the bakery, borrowing a book from the library, buying a coffee in a café etc. The businesses and their employees have agreed to use Icelandic with the learners and have been trained to do so. This training is necessary to prevent the locals from switching to English (Theodórsdóttir & Eskildsen, 2011) A sojourn through the Icelandic Village is thus a guided participation in real-life interaction in Icelandic. The design of the Icelandic Village is in the shape of an infinity symbol, ∞, linking classroom interaction to the learners’ interaction in the Icelandic Village; the learners first visit the village for investigating the place, collecting words and phrases, opening their eyes and ears to the language all around them in the place. The next step is bringing their ‘catch’ to the classroom to work on with the teacher to prepare the actual business encounter. The learners then do their business, record the encounter, and bring this recording back to the classroom for further scrutiny in a de-briefing session (Theodórsdóttir & Wagner, 2013). The paper presents the Icelandic Village and shows, through data from the business encounters and the classroom, how rich in learning and teaching opportunities this environment is.

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