Below is an interview with Dr. Doan Thi Hue Dung and Mr. Nguyen Nhat Quang, who recently collaborated on a paper titled “Affordance Theory in Language Education: A Multi-Dimensional Framework,” which discusses building learning-centered practices in contemporary language learning environments through a ‘multidimensional affordance framework.’
Dr. Dung is the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Saigon International University (SIU), while Mr. Nhat Quang is the Director of the Center for Language and Technology at SIU and a co-editor of several prestigious research journals. They’re interviewed here by John Clark from the TOEFL team.
Before we dive into your paper, I’m first curious to ask: How did you learn English?
Our journeys were different, but we share one basic lesson: English became meaningful to us not when we memorized more rules, but when we started using it to do real things. It became the language through which we read, discussed ideas, wrote, researched, and connected with wider academic and professional communities.
That experience shaped an important belief behind our work. Language is not just something learners accumulate. It is something they develop through purposeful use. In that sense, English grows when it becomes part of life, not just part of study.
That lived experience also helped motivate the framework we later developed together, which tries to explain language learning not as passive intake, but as active engagement with meaningful possibilities.
What a poetic description of the value of acquiring a new language. Thank you. In your paper, you note that the ‘over-rigid and deterministic nature’ of traditional language learning poses an impediment for today’s students. Do you see this phenomenon in English training at the secondary level in Vietnam today?
Yes, we do. In many secondary school contexts in Vietnam, English learning is still shaped by exam pressure, fixed sequences, and the expectation that students reproduce correct answers efficiently. The issue is not the structure itself, because structure matters.
The problem begins when structure becomes so rigid that students are trained to avoid mistakes more than to explore meaning. A system that treats error mainly as failure often produces caution rather than growth. But language develops through guided risk-taking, experimentation, and participation.
One reason we proposed our multidimensional affordance framework was precisely to move beyond this oversimplified, linear view of learning and to offer a more realistic account of how development actually happens in classrooms.
To what extent has the proliferation of new language learning technology – which is being implemented in today’s classrooms at a rapid pace – helped move us beyond an oversimplified, linear view of learning? And where has it fallen short?
Technology has made language learning more dynamic in important ways. Learners can now receive faster feedback, practice more often, and work at a pace that is better aligned with their needs. In many cases, digital tools make learning more interactive, more responsive, and more continuous than older models allowed.
At the same time, technology can also create the illusion of progress. A learner may be active without becoming more capable or engaged without becoming more reflective. The central question is not whether a tool looks advanced, but whether it deepens learning. Good technology does not simply make language practice faster. It helps learners perceive more of their affordances, think more clearly, and act with well-informed purpose.
That is why some newer developments in language learning and assessment are promising. They are moving toward more adaptive design, clearer feedback, and a stronger connection between performance and meaningful growth.
Our Five-Dimensional Affordance Theory was developed with exactly this challenge in mind: how to distinguish environments that are merely active from those that are truly educative.
This is a very helpful analysis. And indeed, the recent addition of multistage adaptivity to TOEFL aligns with this theoretical shift. Looking more closely at the theory you mention above, could you define ‘affordances’ and share the practical benefits of applying affordance theory to language education?
In simple terms, affordances are context- and consequence-sensitive opportunities for action. They do not exist only in the environment or only inside the learner. They emerge in the relationship between the two. A classroom discussion, a teacher’s question, a peer comment, or a digital tool becomes an affordance when it offers a learner a meaningful possibility for action.
This perspective is practical because it shifts educators' attention. Instead of asking only whether content was delivered, we begin asking whether the environment actually enabled meaningful learning. That shift helps explain why the same task may energize one learner, confuse another, and silence a third.
It also helps teachers and designers become more open-minded and educationally precise. Teaching improves when we stop asking only what was taught and start asking what became learnable. We believe one contribution of our framework is that it makes this insight more usable by mapping affordances across five interrelated dimensions rather than treating them as a fixed hierarchy or a one-dimensional concept.
One further implication of our work is that affordances matter not only in teaching but also in assessment. From this perspective, a good assessment should not simply rank learners after the fact. It should make performance more interpretable, reveal what learners are ready to do next, and turn evaluation into part of the learning environment itself.
That, we think, is one of the broader strengths of the Nguyen and Doan framework: it helps connect instruction, participation, and assessment within a single ecological view of development.
This further echoes the motivation behind the recent updates to TOEFL, which focused on improving the interpretability of our results, especially in modern classroom contexts, where students are often actively participating in group learning, not just passively listening to lectures.
Your paper further defines affordances across five dimensions: perceptibility, learning valence, compositionality, normativity, and intentionality. To start: what do you mean by ‘learning valence’?
Learning valence refers to the educational value or direction of an affordance. Not every opportunity helps learning simply because it exists. Some opportunities strengthen attention, confidence, and understanding. Others distract, discourage, or reward only superficial performance.
This is important because educational quality should not be judged by the number of options learners are given, but by the kind of development those options support. More opportunity does not always mean better learning. In education, value lies not in abundance alone, but in direction.
We see learning valence as one of the framework’s most useful contributions because it gives teachers a language for asking not just whether students are engaged, but whether that engagement is moving them in a genuinely developmental direction.
Indeed, we also aim to avoid rewarding superficial performance in the assessment context, where results are only meaningful to the extent that they predict real-world skills.
On the topic of valence, you use group work as an example of something that could have either a positive or negative learning valence. Could you discuss how group work might help or hinder a student’s progress in learning English?
Group work can be highly beneficial when it creates genuine interaction, shared responsibility, and real opportunities for learners to explain, negotiate, and revise meaning together. In those situations, students do not simply sit next to one another. They become linguistic and intellectual resources for one another. Language becomes social, purposeful, and memorable.
But group work can also hinder learning. If the task is vague, the roles are unequal, or the classroom culture makes students afraid of embarrassment, one learner may dominate while others withdraw. In such cases, the appearance of collaboration hides the reality of passivity.
Group work helps only when participation is real. Sitting in a group is not the same as learning together. This is exactly why a multidimensional framework matters: it helps us see that the success of group work depends not only on the activity itself, but also on how it is perceived, valued, structured, normatively regulated, and intentionally taken up by learners.
That’s a fair summary of the value of intentional, high-quality group work. And this multidimensional framework is especially valuable in group learning contexts where participants are from many different corners of the world.
Moving to another dimension of affordance that you discuss in your paper: What do you mean by ‘normativity’?
Normativity refers to the rules, expectations, values, and judgments that shape what learners feel able, allowed, or expected to do. These norms can come from school culture, peer pressure, family expectations, or the learner’s own internalized beliefs. They influence not only behavior, but perception itself. A learner may see an opportunity and still not act on it because the action feels risky, inappropriate, or socially costly.
That is why learning is never purely cognitive. It is also social and cultural. Students do not act only on what they can do. Very often, they act on what they feel, consciously or unconsciously, permitted to do.
We would argue that normativity is one of the dimensions too often neglected in mainstream language education, and one reason our framework has resonated with educators is that it gives this hidden yet decisive factor a more central place.
We are sensitive to these social and cultural variations, as well. Our TOEFL Assessment Specialists, to use one example, conduct a thorough review for potential cultural biases before a test item is subjected to further validation.
To go a bit deeper on this topic: Can you provide a few examples where social or cultural rules can thwart a student’s English learning progress?
Certainly. In some classrooms, asking questions may be interpreted as challenging the teacher, so students suppress clarification even when confusion is real. Some learners internalize the belief that they should not speak unless they are certain they are correct, which turns practice into a public risk rather than a normal part of development. Others may come to feel that advanced English belongs to other people from other schools, backgrounds, or social positions.
In each of these cases, the problem is not simply a lack of knowledge. It is that the environment has narrowed what feels possible. A student often stops taking advantage of an opportunity long before they stop needing it. One strength of our framework, we think, is that it helps make these often-invisible barriers more visible to teachers and curriculum designers.
I have experienced this in my own teaching – I welcome constant feedback and criticism from students in the classroom, but students from some cultures are less comfortable with this degree of informality than others, so I try to modulate my behavior accordingly.
Raising the level of learning valence and keeping an eye on normativity are worthwhile goals. Could you discuss some of the challenges inherent to implementing these affordance dimensions in digital learning environments?
One challenge is that digital systems often confuse existence with access. A feature may be present, but if it is buried, unclear, badly timed, or cognitively overwhelming, it does not function as a real affordance.
Another challenge is what we might call affordance inflation: learners are surrounded by prompts, metrics, dashboards, and AI outputs, yet much of this abundance fragments attention rather than deepens learning.
There is also the risk that personalization becomes narrowing. A system may become so optimized for convenience or prediction that it keeps learners inside familiar habits rather than opening new developmental possibilities. A good digital environment should not merely make learning easier to consume. It should make meaningful action easier to notice, take up, and sustain.
Our framework was designed to be especially helpful here, because digital learning environments are precisely where it becomes most important to distinguish between what is available, what is visible, what is valued, and what is used for growth.
The framework is also especially important in assessment-rich digital environments. If tasks are visible but not meaningful, or feedback is abundant but not actionable, the system may generate data without generating development.
A more useful model is to think of digital assessment as an affordance system: one that should help learners perceive what matters, understand what their performance means, and recognize where growth is possible.
This is certainly aligned with ETS’ efforts to ensure that assessment feedback is – as you articulate quite well – not just abundant but actionable. My final question, leaning into a positive direction: Do digital environments hold some advantages to building a learner-centered approach to English teaching that physical classroom settings may lack?
Yes, they can. Digital environments can preserve learner histories, adapt pace, reveal patterns over time, and create lower-pressure spaces for experimentation and revision. They can help teachers see not only whether students performed, but how they engaged, where they hesitated, and what support they may need next.
That orientation becomes especially valuable when digital systems are designed not just for efficiency, but for clarity, interpretability, and growth. This is where an affordance-based view of assessment becomes especially relevant. In our view, strong assessment is not only about measuring performance accurately. It is also about making performance more legible, feedback more usable, and next steps easier for learners and teachers to recognize.
That logic makes some recent changes in major English assessment systems pedagogically interesting. What matters, from an affordance perspective, is not that assessment becomes more technological, but that it becomes more intelligible and more educationally adaptive to learners’ moment-to-moment needs.
A final point runs through all these questions: language learning is strongest when learners are not treated as recipients of instruction, but as active participants in environments that help them notice, choose, sometimes fail, and grow. That, in many ways, is the central promise of the Nguyen and Doan affordance framework. It offers not just a theory of language learning, but a more realistic way of seeing what good education must make possible.
Agreed! And our TOEFL research team would loudly applaud your notes about the importance of accurate measurement and making performance more legible.
Thank you both for your time. And for your contributions to the general field of language learning research. This has been enormously enlightening.
Thank you.
