Introduction to Affordances

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What are affordances? 🧠

Affordances refer to meaningful ways of interacting with the environment through perception-in-action (Van Lier, 2002). Gaver (1991) defines four types of affordances:

  • Perceptible Affordance: Clear and obvious potential for action.
  • Hidden Affordance: Exists but is not immediately noticeable.
  • Correct Rejection: The absence of affordance where none should exist.
  • False Affordance: Appears to have potential but does not function as expected.

Kyttä (2003) proposes potential, perceived, utilized, and shaped affordances.

  • Potential affordances: Affordances that are available.
  • Perceived affordances: Affordances that the individual recognizes but does not act upon.
  • Utilized affordances: Affordances that the individual takes advantage of and leads to action.
  • Shaped affordances: Affordances that influence an individual’s action.

Affordance and selective engagement 💡

Education involves developing the ability “to selectively pick up some aspects of the environment while ignoring others” (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014, p. 335).

The quote emphasizes how learners tune into specific elements of their environment that are meaningful or useful while filtering out others. This process, central to the concept of affordances, suggests that environments present various possibilities for action, but only some are perceived and acted upon depending on the learner’s goals, background, and context.

Connecting affordances to plurilingualism 🗣️🔤

In plurilingual language education contexts, learners navigate and engage with multiple linguistic resources, not just formal languages, but dialects, gestures, symbols, and cultural cues. Through affordances, they selectively engage with the languages they need depending on context. For example, a student might draw on French vocabulary in a classroom setting, Urdu phrases with family, and English expressions online. As a result, the learning environment becomes a rich landscape of linguistic possibilities, where students actively choose which tools to use, reinforcing the idea that meaning-making is rooted in situated, purposeful action.

Connecting affordances to technology 💻📱

Technology multiplies the range of affordances with diverse tools such as translation apps, plurilingual chat platforms, immersive VR experiences, or speech-to-text tools.

Learners use these tools not passively, but strategically, selecting digital affordances that help them navigate tasks, connect across languages, or represent ideas more fully. Hence, the environment is no longer static, it is dynamic and co-constructed by learners using digital means.

Connecting affordances to action-oriented approach ⚙️

Action-oriented Approach positions learners as agents who accomplish tasks in real-life scenarios rather than abstract exercises. Affordances come into play as students perceive opportunities to act within authentic scenarios, whether collaborating in multiple languages, creating a video presentation, or solving a problem using digital tools.

Here, plurilingual and technological affordances support this enactment, enabling learners to draw on varied competencies and resources based on the purpose and context of the scenario.

References 📝

Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. In S. P. Robertson, G. M. Olson, & J. S. Olson (Eds.), Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology CHI ’91 (CHI ’91 conference proceedings) (pp. 79–84). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Kyttä, M. (2003). Children in outdoor contexts: Affordances and independent mobility in the assessment of environmental child friendliness (Doctoral dissertation). Helsinki University of Technology. http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2003/isbn9512268736/isbn9512268736.pdf

Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2014). A Rich Landscape of Affordances. Ecological Psychology, 26(4), 325–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2014.958035

van Lier, L. (2002). An ecological- semiotic perspective on language and linguistics. In C. Kramsch (ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization. Ecological perspectives (pp. 140– 164). New York: Continuum.

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