This paper explores space as a factor in the complexity of language learner agency and identity. Where language learning happens influences how it happens. Language learning can also open up new spaces for the learner, so that where it happens becomes contingent on the learner’s agency and evolving multilingual identities.
I have argued in the past that individual differences in language learning are best understood in terms of diversity of experience. Language learners become different over time as a consequence of experiences in which they exercise their agency to incorporate their language learning into developing multilingual identities. Diversity of individual experience is, thus, a key factor in the complexity of language learning. In more recent work, I have explored the ways in which space is an additional important factor in the complexity of language learner agency and identity. All experience is spatial in the sense that it happens somewhere. However, language learning experiences are spatial in two specific senses. First, where language learning takes place, especially the proximity to or distance from the target language, makes a difference to how languages are learned. Second, language learning 'widens the horizons' of the learner, both metaphorically and geographically, and often takes the learners to places they might not otherwise have considered. Agency links these two senses of the spatiality of language learning, as the places where the learner learns a language become contingent on decisions to expand the space of the language learning environment over time. Learners' evolving multilingual identities also become contingent upon their agency in uses of space for the purposes of language learning and use.
