Exploring a social space for language learning

This chapter chronicles a narrative inquiry comprised of a collection of sixteen stories about how students, teachers and administrators experience the L-café, a social space for foreign language learning located on the campus of a large national university in Japan. Adopting a narrative style, this introductory chapter begins with a description of the L-café and a brief outline of its history, after which it tells the story of the five-year ethnographic study leading up to the current inquiry. It then provides an account of how the theoretical perspective informing the interpretation of the stories expanded from a focus on community of practice to encompass constructs from human geography, mediated discourse analysis and complex dynamic systems theory. It concludes with a synopsis of the participants' contributions.