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Technology integrated instructional materials harnessing Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools, such as e-mail and Second Life (SL), have formed catalysts in expanding the classroom ecology in English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. They have also offered opportunities to investigate the culturally distinctive values and practices that generate culturally afforded contradictions (Thorne, 2003; see also O’Dowd & Ritter, 2006; Murphy & Rodriguez-Manzanares, 2008 for an overview of the studies on contradictions and intercultural exchanges). Studies on intercultural partnerships have demonstrated that online communicative activity is not enacted on hyperpersonal communication (see Walther, 1996, 2007) but rather on the historically and culturally derived expectations that lead to contradictions (Thorne, 2003; Ware, 2005; Basharina, 2007; Hadjistassou, 2012). In SL, multiple studies have been undertaken to investigate the emerging interactional dynamics in molding learning and teaching practices, role-playing, collaboration, caring, participation in problem-solving activities, and oral participation (see Clark, 2008; Deutchmann, et al. 2009; Peterson, 2010; Jauregi et al., 2011; Liang, 2012; Ho et al., 2012; Zheng, 2012).
These studies have shed some light on the learners’ roles in transforming the collaborative dynamics through students’ participation in linguistic actions and caring for their peers (see Zheng, 2012). They have also opened the path to reconceptualize and experience intercultural communications in three-dimensional interactive environments afforded by a learner’s virtual persona. However, none of these studies has investigated culturally generated contradictions per se in such semiotically related learning environments (see Gee, 2005). These studies have not explored the role of tensions in molding students’ and instructors’ interactions during transatlantic transactions, in building new affordances for discussions on sociopolitical issues, such as sustainability practices, and in engaging learners and instructors in task-driven activities. Transatlantic transactions in SL unfold in a simulated, game-driven platform where the learners’ multilevel and simultaneous engagement with interactive artifacts, images, symbols, socially built identities through avatars, communication modes generates new learning experiences (see Gee, 2005; Clark, 2008; Mennecke et al., 2011; Liang, 2012; Jauregi et al., 2011; Zheng, 2012). Engagement with multiple interrelated sign systems in this virtual environment is a complex process which requires further investigation in order to understand the enacted tensions and affordances for realizing interactions and learning.