Co-experiencing event friendship, languaging, well being and extended reality technologies

Dongping Zheng, University of Hawaii

This talk explores relationships between event friendship, well being, and languaging in cross-cultural experiential environments.  Cross-cultural co-experiencing in a virtual or augmented world can promote language learners’ well being by helping them  learn to be mindful of their languaging when talking to a someone from a different culture. If we go beyond thinking of the utilitarian benefits of virtual worlds for language learning, we can reorient to cross-cultural well being in languaging, which co-emerges with event friendship. Event friendship is a Confucian concept associated with the joy of co-experiencing (Lambert, 2018; Zheng et al., 2018).  As Confucius famously said, “The one who knows is less desired than the one who is interested to know; and the one who is interested to know is less desired than the one who derives joy from learning” (知之者不如好之者；好之者不如乐之者）. The joy of the interbodily and relational dynamics of collaboration is the optimal state of well-being. Being in and of the world, whether virtual or material, chaotic or peaceful, is necessary for honing the skills we need for languaging and recognizing its power to shape our lives.  Through our previous work, we have seen how the flourishing of human relationships in event friendships cultivated languaging, both for language learners and for us as collaborators.

Cross-cultural competence is usually measured as a cognitive ability acquired by individual effort in cross-cultural situations. This monological competence is challenged by ecological and biological perspectives in that people seek good prospects in conversing, not just exchange of information (Hodges, 2007).  Furthermore, in ecolinguistic terms, competencies and well-being are achievements of an organism-environment system (Jarvilehto, 1998), which means that in optimal harmonizing and equilibrium, the environments of learning are not separable from the actions of language learners. In this paper,  we take conversing as values realizing, way making (Hodges, 2009) and community synergizing (Newgarden, Zheng & Liu, 2015).  We aim to extend the notion of cross-cultural competence to cross-cultural well being. We suggest this dialogical cross-cultural well being is interdependent on co-experiencing event friendship, which can be enabled by virtual and augmented reality technologies. Co-experiencing of events can be traced to have causal effects for cognition, cultural awareness and friendliness. While these positive effects are already associated with immersive virtual reality experiences; we want to frame them in bio-ecological and contemplative terms, as products of languaging that are other-environment-dependent. When developing event friendship is put at the fore, rather than accomplishing individual-based language learning or personal well-being, these effects can be co-conditioning, and additional  to the acquisition of linguistic forms and language use during coordination and coaction.

Note: This talk is based on a collbarive propsal with Kristi Newgarden, Thao Le and Ying Hu.

共同体验事情友谊、语言、幸福和扩展现实技术

夏威夷大学第二语言研究系郑东萍副教授、博士生导师

本文探讨了事情之间的关系友谊,幸福,和在跨文化经验的语言环境。跨文化共同体验在虚拟或增强世界能促进语言学习者的幸福,帮助他们学会注意自己的语言说话的时候,有人从一个不同的文化。如果我们超越思想的实用的虚拟世界对语言学习的好处,我们可以调整跨文化在语言,与事情共现友谊。事情的友谊是一个儒家的概念联系在一起的共同体验喜悦(兰伯特,2018;郑et al ., 2018)。孔子有句名言:”知之者不如好之者;好之者不如乐之者”。人际关系的动态合作所带来的喜悦是最佳的健康状态。无论是虚拟或材料,混乱或和平,对于珩磨技能是必要的，我们需要语言和感受来塑造我们的生活。通过我们之前的工作,我们已经看到如何在事情友谊培养人际关系，发展语言,为语言学习者和我们的合作者。

跨文化能力通常是看作认知能力，在跨文化的情况下通过个人努力获得。这个单一的能力是受到生态和生物的视角挑战,因为人们对话中寻求好的前景,不只是交换信息(霍奇斯,2007)。此外,生态语言学而言,能力和幸福成就一个有机体-环境系统(Jarvilehto, 1998),这意味着最佳的协调和平衡中,学习的环境与语言学习者的行为并不分离。在本文中,我们以谈话为价值实现方式(霍奇斯,2009年)和社区协同加强(Newgarden,郑&刘,2015)。我们的目标是扩大跨文化能力的概念。我们建议这个问答的跨文化是相互依存的共同体验事情友谊,可以通过虚拟和现实增强技术。共同体验事情可以追溯到认知起因、文化和友情。虽然这些积极影响已经与沉浸式虚拟现实经验相关，我们想把生物生态和沉思,其它依赖环境看作语言的产品。当开发事情友谊是首要的,而不是完成基于单独的语言学习或个人幸福,这些影响可以合作协调额外的语言形式和语言使用。