Blurb:

Learning environments enhanced by game engines to create virtual worlds are bringing language teachers exciting new tools with which to engage learners in more meaningful ways, and more importantly, are stimulating reflection on whether current pedagogies are functioning as they should in face2face environments. By focusing on the affordances that new technologies provide learning and on how people learn in different ways with technology, the volume offers innovative theoretical and practical contributions on key issues in this field and contributes to transcending the current state of affairs whereby many classroom practices fail to tap the full potential of virtual world technology. The volume, and supporting website, thus provide a much-needed distributed language perspective that can guide language learning and instruction in new ways thereby ensuring that sound theory and good practices accompany the use of these environments. In particular, ecological psychological, dialogical, and distributed multimodal meaning-making and value-realizing aspects, the backbone of the distributed approach, will be used to explore language learning in virtual and classroom spaces.