Language play in a second language: Social media as contexts for emerging Sociopragmatic competence

This study is part of a research project called Linguascapes, which investigates L2 learning activities in social media contexts as part of institutional learning (Bowen et al. 2016; Lantz-Andersson 2015; 2016; Lantz-Andersson et al. 2013; 2016; Vigmo and Lantz-Andersson 2014). The theoretical underpinnings of the study incorporate a sociocultural perspective, where learning is understood as developing in social activities that cannot be predefined, because they are created, recreated and negotiated by participants in the practice. Language learning is thus regarded as being participatory, socially constituted and inseparable from social context (Vygotsky 1939/1978).

Drawing on the Vygotskian view of play as part of human learning, which implies a way of trying out and practicing new ways of expressing oneself, empirical material will be analysed in regard to how the participants frame and adjust to invisible situational norms and the other people involved in the activities (Goffman 1974). The ongoing and dynamic framing of an activity is understood as repeatedly reshaped in interaction and transformed or keyed by shifts in context, for example, from being serious and truthful to being playful by invoking jokes or irony (Goffman 1974). The analysis of the different linguistic repertoires is further based in the notion of language play, which is regarded as central to language development (Cook 2000).

The aim of this study is to gain insights into students’ language use on social media as part of the specific linguistic activities of second language (L2) learning, including development of sociopragmatic competence. The study explores (a) how the students frame the activity by their use of linguistic repertoires and (b) in what ways students combine features of the language variety derived from out-of-school social media use in a playful manner in their textual interactions. The empirical material consists of the written interactions of two Facebook groups that were introduced in English-as-L2 classes that were part of an international collaborative project involving secondary schools in Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan.

In the sections that follow, the conceptual distinctions of language play are reviewed, as are ways in which language play is related to L2 language learning and social media interaction.

By embedding language play into a wide sociocultural perspective, Crystal (1998) and Cook (2000) argue that playing with language is a natural part of developing and learning a language. Language play integrates form, meaning and function, and is managed by manipulating the language by, for instance, taking linguistic features and doing something unusual with them. In Cook’s (2000) view, language play includes both play in and with the language. Playing in the language implies a ludic use of language playing with sounds, rhythm, rhyme, grammatical structure, etc. Playing with the language means playing with the units of meaning, creating words that do not exist or combining them in playful ways. Playing with the language is performed by, for example playing with the message through irony or mockery.. Thus, language play integrates form, meaning and function. Cook (1997) argues that language play is a basic form of being a member of a community:

Many conversations between friends and intimates contain little information, and maybe regarded as instances of play and banter. These discourses are not used to solve a practical problem. They are not ‘task based’. They are language for enjoyment, for the self, for its own sake. And they are often fantasies - not about the real world, but about a fictional one in which there are no practical outcomes. (Cook, 1997, p. 230)

Language play comes about when the “the rules governing literal discourse have been suspended” (Crystal 1998, p. 4) and, when language play is employed, participants feel inspired to join. This description of language play parallels Bakhtin’s (1941) carnival concept that derives from notions of the medieval carnival as a place in which the rules and regulations that determine the course of everyday life are temporarily suspended, allowing a playful language use filled with fantasizing and mockery (cf. Lantz-Andersson et al. 2013; 2016).

Danet (2001), one of the pioneers in the study of online language, showed great interest in playful on-line communication. She argues that the frequent occurrences of language play in online communication are due to four factors: a) the dynamic nature of digital interaction implying that we receive instant feedback; b) its immersive nature characterised by the ease in which we become absorbed in a flow and lose track of time; c) the hacker culture that introduced a play with symbols and typography which spread to other online communities and; d) masking of identity (physical appearance, ethnicity, gender, etc.).

In her studies, Danet (2001) found that in language play sequences, one of these factors was frequently dominant, but all four factors were almost always involved in some sense. Furthermore, Danet argues that young peoples’ language play is related to identity negotiation and, as such, it is precisely the kind of language use they value. It is well known that young children use language to play via rhymes, certain poetry, rap, puns, constructing new words, etc., which are common features of language learning in the early ages. However, much less attention is paid to the fact that adolescents and adults are also fond of language play (Bell et al. 2014; Cook 2000; Danet 2001).

As previously mentioned, this case study draws on sociocultural perspectives on communication and learning, foregrounding interaction as central for human learning (Vygotsky 1939/1978). Learning is further understood as constituted in social activities embedded in the context where the learner participates. From this standpoint, what kind of interaction takes place is not something that can be predetermined, but is dynamically negotiated in the social context: this view conforms with Goffman’s (1974) framework theory. Goffman emphasises that participants always try to understand what kind of activity they are part of. They then frame the activities in accordance with their understanding and adjust their communication thereto, which in turn co-determines how the activity proceeds. Thus, the framing of the activity is constantly redefined by the participants in the communication.

The framework theory is based on the notion that interactions always involve a primary framework and also include different layers of framing (Goffman 1974). In sequences of interaction, participants transform or key these primary frameworks, for example, from being serious and truthful to being playful by means of jokes or irony, which implies that the practices change. The most common way of keying, according to Goffman, is make-believe keying, in which playfulness is the central component, often achieved by playing with the linguistic repertoires used in communication. Thus, when participants use language play in communication, it entails a way of upkeying the activity performed by adding, for example, humorous, satiric or ironic layers to the interaction. Danet (2001) argues that online communication is especially apt for language play, because the identity of the participants in some sense are discussed and therefore they can “enjoy reduced accountability for their actions, and can engage in ‘pretend’ or ‘make-believe’ behaviours of all kinds” (p. 8).

Framework theory originated before the introduction of computer-mediated interaction, but in his late writings, Goffman (1981) also included aspects of media communication, such as TV and radio, and I maintain, in accordance with Danet (2001), that framework theory lends itself well for analysing online interaction (cf., also Pietraß 2009; Ytreberg 2002). In studies of social media interaction, small shifts in textual utterances become signs of how communication is framed and keyed. Online interaction provides linguistic repertoires that are distinct from those of face-to-face communication. An example of this is emoticons: by adding an emoticon to a serious utterance, participants can support an upkeyed framing of the communication. In this sense, all forms of make-believe keying could be viewed as a type of play. The research interest and theoretical underpinning of this study, thus, require a method that enables a close-up examination of the linguistic repertoires that students employ in textual interactions in social media spaces.

Drawing on interactional ethnography (Castanheira et al. 2000), the analysis explored how the students framed the activities in relation to what they considered appropriate literate practices. Interactional ethnography, rooted in ethnography and including traditions of conversation analysis, was useful for analysing the linguistic repertoires as well as the students’ responses to one another’s utterances in the moment-by-moment interactions in the social media spaces (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014).

The researcher was positioned as an observer that visited the Facebook groups as soon as there was any activity (made possible by selecting the ‘on’ option for ‘push notifications’ for group activities). More specifically, the interactional ethnography method required that the interactions were observed throughout the continuum of both Facebook groups to learn about the interactive activities with an attempt to discern nuances of framing in the participants’ communication (cf. Davies and Merchant 2007; Lantz-Andersson 2016; Selwyn 2009).

When the Facebook groups were concluded, the participating students’ textual interactions were logged, and the screen actions were captured using Jing (a free TechSmith software) to analyse the multimodal elements—the links, photos and videos the students used to represent and express themselves. Thereafter, a free, open-source, web-based tool (The NetVis Module https://​apps.​facebook.​com/​netvizz/​) that extracts data from different sections of the Facebook platform was used as a first step to systematise the group interactions and to obtain a general summary of the postings and comments, as shown in Table 1.

This initial, elementary survey of postings provided an inventory of the number of postings and comments, enabling us to examine, in greater depth, those with two or more comments. By investigating the broad patterns in such postings, the focus was the linguistic repertoires the students chose and what that implied in terms of how they framed the activity (Goffman 1974). In both groups approximately 60% of the FB groups’ postings have two or more comments, as shown in Table 1. In one sense the interactive pattern could be seen as rather low in relation to general social media communication that are interaction characterized by people interacting with users already known. However, the institutionally implemented Facebook groups of this study imply that the students are encouraged to communicate with distant others and the interactive pattern need to be understood on the basis of that (Manago et al. 2012).

The next step of the analysis was categorization of the interaction into two categories of play, inspired by Warner (2004), who based them on Cook’s (2000) notion of different types of playing utilised through the linguistic choices: play with the form and play with the content. Warner (2004) uses a third notion, or category, play with the frame. The way framework theory is understood in the present study, play with the frame or upkey the frame is, however, seen as intertwined with language play and, therefore, this category was omitted. In the continuing analysis, it was found that the two categories involving form and content in language play were integrated most of the time; nonetheless, the categories are still used to explicitly display this integration.

The overall findings show that the initial framing of the interaction in the two groups presented a pattern largely related to the institutional traditions of L2 learning. One of the first postings of each group illustrates this in Fig. 1.

Figure 1 shows that the traditional use of linguistic repertoires of written English, in line with English as a foreign language as taught and learned in school, is initially predominant in relation to a framing with colloquial language used on social media (Kern 2014). Thus, a framing according to solving a school task takes precedence, which is seen in the genre of self-presentation and the linguistic repertoire that adheres to traditional conventions of writing, such as complete, grammatical sentences, the use of parentheses and starting sentences with capital letters and ending with punctuation. The only indication of a more casual linguistic repertoire is the emoticon “:)” that completes the posting in FB Group 2 (to the right in Fig. 1). However, the emoticon is not seen as language play in the sense that it changes the meaning of the posting. Instead, the emoticon in this posting is merely used to finish a statement which, in line with arguments by Walther and D’Addario (2001)), is regarded as an indication of a social media convention with little intention to upkey what is written. The postings from the initial phase indicate that using social media in an English L2 class does not by itself imply that the students frame the activity in line with the conventions of social media interactions of socially situated vernacular writing (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011; Vandergriff and Fuchs 2009).

As the interactions continue in both groups, a variety of linguistic repertoires was used, entailing different framings that include language play. Figure 2, from the first FB group, is from a context in which the students introduce themselves by including whether they have pets or play any instruments.

The content of the posting from a Finnish girl is a presentation that includes her age, where she is from, what instrument she plays and that she has a dog. This way of framing her introduction is in line with a common exercise in language classes. However, the posting also includes linguistic repertoires of social media interactions. For example, “Heey” involves adding extra letters to words, and the use of emoticons signifies the shared convention for linguistic coordination in social media spaces that supports a more colloquial everyday communication style in relation to solving a school task (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014; Boyd 2008). The first comment answers the question on pets in a polite tone, but the student posts before having finished the comment and embraces the sign *, a convention that marks a correction. Thereafter another student asks about the age of the dog. This receives a proper answer, which also is finished by a multi-nosed emoticon, again understood more as a social media convention than an intention to upkey what is written (Walther and D’Addario 2001). The thread is completed by two comments that play with language by repeating the word “AWESOME!!!”. By embracing the convention of multiple capital letters followed by numerous exclamation marks, the students play with the form of the language with a typographical choice signalling either a loud screaming voice or just attention (cf. Danet 2001). The word “awesome” is used continuously in this FB group as playful jargon that involves exaggerations, relying on the shared repertoires-in-use (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014). This kind of repetition is common in the learning of a second language and is discussed by Čekaitė and Aronsson (2004)) as recycling of prior participants’ utterances, which is not seen as imitative in any mechanistic way. Instead this involves some kind of perspective-taking, teasing, joking or parody. Furthermore, recycling, as language play is not only understood as playing with the language, but also as a way for the students who make these comments to acknowledge one another in a kind of verbal duel (Cook 2000). This posting and the comments, thus, display an intertwined framing in which the language play with content and form accomplishes an uokeyed interaction in relation to schooling. A similar combination, in which the emphasis on playing with content is performed partly by playing with form, is displayed in Fig. 3.

The posting in Fig. 3 presents disparate framings of the activity. On the one hand, it is a response to a teacher’s trigger about the students’ music preferences; on the other hand, it is framed in line with social media conventions such as the use of multiple lowercase letters where uppercase letters would be expected in formal contexts and the common ending with emoticons (cf. Boyd 2008; Dresner and Herring 2010; Thorne 2013). The comment (spela över), is a slang Swedish expression that means “overact” or “show off” in English, and is followed by a sceptical emoticon and the exclamation “(ohhh reaaaaaally)” in parentheses. First, language play can be seen in the mixing of languages (Androutsopoulos 2014). Second, the use of English as L2 becomes part of the language play and not only as a means of expression (cf. Warner 2004). The two boys are from the same Swedish class; thus, the upkeyed, mocking framing is brought about by the students’ shared history. The framing is done both by playing with the content in dismissing the validity of the statement and also by playing with the form where (ohhh reaaaaaally) is written in a way that could be understood as imitating a specific pronunciation. The reply is a proper answer, beginning with a plain emoticon, in which a reprimand is given for the use of Swedish and a clarification of the music taste, but it also ends with an emoticon that sticks its tongue out, possibly signalling some kind of revengeful play. Thus, the specific emoticon that completes the posting is not only understood as a social media convention; it also implies a continuation of the teasing framing in the comment (cf. Walther and D’Addario 2001). This kind of ironically or mockingly framed language play is also shown in Fig. 4.

In the context of music preferences, a student from Finland mentions a favourite song by Justin Bieber and provides a link to the video of the song. The first comment is an ironic way of disagreeing seen in the utterance “:/ no comments._.”. The phrase “no comments” is an expression commonly used to imitate responses to journalistic inquiries that respondents do not wish to answer. The first emoticon: / signals scepticism, and the second,. _., is a sign for looking down. The choice of emoticons here interplays with the framed intention of the utterance (cf. Dresner and Herring 2010). This is shown by the Finnish student’s understanding of the comment, who starts the reply with onomatopoeic laughter “haha” and a response that could be understood as a deliberate misunderstanding “you think he is soo good youre speechless?;)” following the tone in the previous comment, and ending with a winking emoticon, framing the comment as playfully ironic (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014). The commenter, who is from Colombia, replies with onomatopoeic laughter in Spanish: “jajaja” and “no!”. The thread is then completed with a comment with laughter and an additional emoticon including a wink from another student aligning with the established framing. This is an additional example of how an upkeyed framing is managed by playing with the form with onomatopoeic linguistic repertoires in choosing emoticons and certain expressions that interplay with the content. Here, the students show signs of sociopragmatic competence by sensitivity in conforming to the way the activity is framed (cf. Harlow 1990) and, as shown in the study by Fusaroli and Tylén (2012), this is a negotiated, joint activity. Another example of an upkeyed framing is shown in Fig. 5. (In Figs. 5 and 6, the comments are numerous and are, therefore, numbered.)

Figure 5, involving Swedish boys from the same class, presents a thoroughly upkeyed framing compared to the initial framings of the interactions in the social media groups. The posting consists of a picture of a well-known character, Gandalf from the film Lord of the Rings, with the statement “Gandalf is not My Dad”. The posting is framed as an out-of-school activity by using the social media space as a “communicative playing field” (Kramsch 2014). The linguistic repertoires of the students’ out-of-school digital vernacular takes precedence, entailing nonsense, playful framing that deviates from conventional forms of writing in an L2 learning context of schooling.

The playful use of a picture of Gandalf with that statement attracts the other students to continue and even heightens the humorous framing (cf. Crystal 1998; Hattem 2014). This is linguistically accomplished by playing with content and form—and by making comments about the picture and the statement. The first comment, “He’s your mother,” is a playful content response to the statement. The second response, “Duckface,” and the third comment, “Bortom det du ser,” are addressing the picture. The third comment in Swedish, which means “beyond what you see,” is also one of the few instances of language play that involved mixing languages in these groups. Thus, the language play is mainly in English, even in threads that consist of only students from the same country. The fourth comment, “HAHAHAHA you’re sick… < 3”, displays how the content of the onomatopoeic laughter, together with the rude message and the final heart, can be understood as an encouraging framing. Thereafter, there are three comments on the statement and a final comment referring to a popular meme based on that line from the movie; “They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard”. The interaction that involves only students from the same class demonstrates that they have sufficient substantive knowledge and their communication is dependent on their shared history, which enables them to tease in a very local language play (cf. Lantz-Andersson 2016). Following Bell’s (2009) argument, it is shown here that humour arises from comments that could be seen as rude, but through the known common ground for communication, the comments are perceived as playful. Figure 6 is an alternative example of upkeyed framing where a language play, far from the institutional framing, is performed.

Figure 6 is initiated by a socializing posting from a male Colombian student asking the other participants how they are doing. The first comment is a response to the request for chit-chat that indicates he should be doing schoolwork: “don’t u have homeworks?” Then the second commenter states “ice-cream.” The initiator responds with “wa?,” which is understood as a request for clarification. Then, in the fifth comment, another student enters the interaction by texting “perp,” which is understood as short for Purple Haze, a marijuana plant (definitions from the Urban Dictionary, http://​www.​urbandictionary.​com). The sixth comment is understood as a clarification from the boy who posted “ice-cream”, with the slang expression “piripitiflautica,” (explained in the Urban Dictionary as a relaxing word to use when frustrated or mad). The communicative context points to an interpretation of “ice cream” to be understood as a slang expression for crack. In comment 7, the initiator repeats “perp” followed by a more direct claim in comment 8, “you like acids dont’ya?” The interaction that follows between the two Colombian boys—“no never,” “are you sure dude,” “yeah nigga” and “ok fella”—is performed by the use of linguistic repertoires with jargon words, as well as by picking up and reusing each other’s comments in a way that could be seen as norm-breaking and far from the traditions of L2 learning in the school setting.

As in the previous excerpt, the space is used as a “communicative playing field” (Kramsch 2014), but it also resembles chat-like interaction, performed by single words and popping in and out of the conversations (Boyd 2008). Such language play could be regarded as a verbal duel (Cook 2000) or as a kind of freestyling (Hattem 2014), which is interaction that resembles the lyrics in hip-hop music, where rappers meet in battles. Here there are also a lot of identity negotiations going on in which the students creatively try out different approaches of how to deal with language play that allude to the use of drugs (cf. Danet 2001).

As in Fig. 5, the students who contribute to this conversation are mostly classmates, and the language play, both related to content and form, performed here is in large part dependent on their shared history (cf. Lantz-Andersson 2016; Vandergriff and Fuchs 2009). However, interestingly, comment 13, “derp” (a typical online word used when someone makes a mistake or does something stupid or ridiculous), is posted by a Swedish boy, who is able to align with the Colombians students’ repertoires-in-use. By his word choice, the boy demonstrates his sociopragmatic competence by attentiveness to what linguistic choice to make to attune to the local coordinated framing (cf. Harlow 1990) and also includes a playful rhyme in the words perp/derp. In line with earlier research (e.g., Bell et al. 2014; Fusaroli and Tylén 2012; Hattem 2014; Vandergriff and Fuchs 2009), the way the students in this thread frame the interaction brings about a sophisticated conversant language play that, by their choice of slang expressions and jargon, displays an awareness of how humour and mockery function as a communication practice in a second language.

This study has explored student’s framing (Goffman 1974) of the interactions in two FB groups by analysing their use of linguistic repertoires. The overall findings show that when the students frame the communication by including features of the linguistic repertoires of their out-of-school social media use, language play with both content and form is performed. The analysis of the interactions revealed both playing with form, for example, shown by the choice of linguistic repertoires, including rhyming, punning and repetition and playing with content, related to meaning and often involving some kind of irony or ridicule in the message (cf. Cook 2000; Danet 2001). For example, in Fig. 4 the students played with the form of language by choosing certain expressions and emoticons that became intertwined with playing with the content in the discussion of whether a song by Justin Bieber is good or not.

In instances of upkeyed framings performed by language play, the students display sociopragmatic competence in how they use their linguistic repertoire not only with pragmatic intentions but also as a means for various kinds of socializing purposes. This is seen, for example, in Fig. 5 where students from the same class more or less hang out in the social media space and interact by small-talking about and around the theme of a mutually known movie using a very local language play. In such cases, the notions of frame and key can also be compared with the distinction between the overall goal of the activity and in what ways the students align in accordance with that goal or transform the school-introduced activity into new activities that better match their desires (cf., Hattem 2014). The upkeyed framing is even more explicit in Fig. 6, where the norm-breaking language play functioned as a trigger for other students to join a kind of carnivalesque framing (Bakhtin 1941). The analysis of this excerpt also shows a considerable amount of identity negotiations underway, in which the students creatively try out different approaches of dealing with language play that alludes to their presented attitudes towards the use of drugs (cf. Danet 2001). Rather than viewing the language use here as merely shallow or simplistic, the communication are seen as involving rather challenging linguistic choices that expose a certain sociopragmatic competence. By zooming in on how the students use their out-of-school digital vernacular, it can be seen that certain repertoires-in-use bring about that the students feel free to elaborate and play with the language, which enables them to practice youths’ sociopragmatic repertoires of English as a global Internet language, despite the fact that the FB-groups were introduced in L2 learning (cf. e.g., Androutsopoulos 2014; Fusaroli and Tylén 2012; Thorne and Reinhardt 2008). Thus, the findings of this study show that multimodal texts demand symbolic sophistication from students and active participation far away from passive reception (cf. Danet 2001; Kern 2014). In that sense, language play implies that the more familiar a student is with the targeted language, the more he or she can master the linguistic choices and respond appropriately to others’ choices, which is not a trivial activity (Cook 2000). Rather, the changes in media environments imply rapid transformations of communication patterns according to the circumstances, which require quite advanced proficiencies.

An important aspect is that the activity is in the form of persistent writing, which not only enable meta-linguistic reflections, such as deliberate formulations (Danet 2001) but also the evolving demands of written, chat-like turn taking, which is a relatively new practice for language use. Thus, adding to the complexity is the hybrid-genre aspect of oral and written communication, common in social media spaces. This includes use of specific emoticons (or other ways of exaggerating and emphasizing) as indicators for irony, teasing and so on (cf. Dresner and Herring 2010; Walther and D’Addario 2001). Another aspect is that social media interaction often includes the kind of English that flourishes in media such as YouTube clips, movies, music, etc. In all, this is a use of language that can be characterised as the vernacular of younger generations and as a global Internet language, which is seldom part of English L2 curricula because it does not belong to what Kern (2014) calls the authoritative language. An additional aspect of significance is that the communication is done in a second language. Being familiarised with the conventions of writing something spontaneously in a foreign language is different—and considerably more challenging—than saying it, because when the writing is unplanned, the foreign language learner must consider norms (or how to break them) regarding spelling, grammar and vocabulary choices (Lantz-Andersson 2015).

The analysis of this study has shown that social media spaces imply linguistic practice in the targeted language that enable students to learn to adapt to the needs of the differently framed communications, which in turn means that they are presented with opportunities to develop sociopragmatic competence (cf. Lomicka and Lord 2016). Thus, the choices of linguistic repertoires that include language play can be seen as an “index of a sharer’s orientation to new social contexts” (Androutsopoulos 2014, p.17). This orientation implies that a specific relationship occurs between the participants, the medium and the context in social media spaces that enables students to make linguistic choices by using their previous knowledge of the targeted language together with experience of social media interactions and other out-of-school influences on the language. Introducing social media as part of L2 learning therefore also resonates with curricular goals that focus on students’ development of all-round communicative abilities in different situations for different purposes, through the use of the language in functional and meaningful contexts. In this perspective, the communication highlights aspects of language use that have been underestimated both as part of L2 learning practices and in research (e.g., Danet 2001; Kern 2014; Kramsch 2014; Lomicka and Lord 2016; Thorne 2013; Warner 2004).

This study focused on the in-depth interaction of two FB groups and is limited insofar that it makes no claims about how frequently or how likely language play is to occur on social media spaces when introduced as part of L2 learning activities. Despite that, the findings provide a contribution to the discussion about expanding the view of language and understanding language play within social media spaces related to its potential value to L2 learning. It is argued here that social media interaction opens up communicative casual learning contexts enabling possibilities for development of sociopragmatic competence, involving the unpredictable nature of open-ended conversations that is desirable when practising a second language. However, writing concrete guidelines for incorporating social media use into L2 instruction is rather problematic for several reasons. First, the applications, as such, do not decide what teachers and students do so if social media become part of the educational environment, it will be used differently. Second, the media ecology changes so quickly that guidelines would quickly become obsolete. Therefore, in this time of constant innovations of media applications that enhance communication, it is necessary for education to develop strategies that integrate social media-spaces (and other recent media applications) in productive ways in the many different teaching contexts that characterise modern education.

To avert that the linguistic repertoires used in social media contexts are perceived as merely shallow linguistic constructions, research must address dichotomies between fluent informal English and formal types and invoke critical awareness of the varieties of textual and oral conventions. This study serves as one example of linguistic activities, which generated possibilities for students to develop sociopragmatic competence but more research is needed on the complex interrelationships between institutional L2 learning practices and the linguistic repertoires of the students’ everyday life.