This qualitative study in an ecological approach to second language acquisition (SLA) investigates how successful English as a second language (ESL) community college students from three characteristic social groups perceive and act upon affordances, or learning episodes, to attain self-regulation of discourse and grammar in a pre-freshman writing course to cross the threshold to freshman composition.; The collective case study examines six participants in two instructional contexts, focusing on an emic participant perspective and highlighting the importance of context through observations, interviews and document analysis. The project builds from a pilot study of a single learner the fall semester 2002, to the actual study, fall 2003, and then to the semester follow up, spring 2004 in Freshman English, to observe maintenance of language learning.; The research shows that animate students exhibiting agency search the environment for affordances perceiving them in three ways: the recognition of difference, the perception of invarients through pattern and order, and the recognition of information that meets their needs. The two separate instructional contexts demonstrate multiple affordances and meager affordances, respectively, resulting in the terminology of affordance rich and affordance constrained environments. Crucial differentiating factors include feedback, nested triadic interaction, a sense of community and pattern and order.; Nine principal SLA and pedagogical findings emerge from the research: (1) language use is language acquisition; (2) the notion of affordance may unite the concepts of input, interaction, and output; (3) an affordance learner is an aware learner; (4) affordances occur in cycles; (5) instructional contexts may vary from affordance rich to affordance constrained; (6) teachers have academic duty to put their students first: such a condition may support teacher construction of affordance rich environments; (7) an instructional context is an ecology; (8) secondary learning contexts, especially those congruent with instructional environments provide affordances; and (9) students feel equanimity in an affordance rich environment.; Finally, an ultimate finding of the study is verstehen: my own understanding of my role as a qualitative researcher and my role in the investigation.
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