THE IDEAS IN THIS MONOGRAPH ARE BUILT UPON THE VARIOUS ‘TURNS’ IN APPLIED linguistics in recent years. The field has expanded its understandings of what language itself is and how learning happens to include social, sociocultural, sociocognitive, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and most recently, post‐human analyses of human meaning making. These paradigm shifts have been especially fruitful in research investigating the process of learning a new language by adolescents and adults. Although many researchers have succeeded in moving away from the limiting epistemologies of structuralist accounts, this has presented new problems of methodology in empirical research, and of theory‐to‐practice connections in educational settings. A perusal of recent applied linguistics scholarship, as well as the programs of scholarly conferences in the United States and many other countries, bears this out. The articles and volume chapters, panels, research strands, and discussions in conference corridors now routinely regard language as well as language learning as complex dynamic systems, or at least as much more than merely the learners’ developing interlanguage or form–meaning mappings, though these remain crucial elements and objects of inquiry. For those concerned with language education, this work reflects an ongoing project to expand and deepen the targets and intended outcomes of instruction beyond transactional communication and bundles of skills, though to my knowledge few have framed this project in terms of human capabilities (cf. Crosbie, 2014). Researchers and other sorts of language professionals are also concerned with engaging learners’ and teachers’ creativity in countless ways, and with fostering both social justice and human compassion through language education, though this latter category has admittedly remained implicit if not subliminal across the board. My hope is that the ideas presented in this monograph enable the theory‐to‐practice endeavor and make some aspects of language pedagogy more central to what language learners do inside and outside of classrooms.

In my discussions with colleagues about the pedagogical approach presented in this monograph, some commented that the van‐Lierian onion analogy brought up in the introduction may not be the most appropriate one to account for the dynamic interrelationships among systemic complexity, human capabilities, creativity, conflict transformation, and compassion, because it does not necessarily show the ways those nested levels interact with and interdepend on one another. An onion, after all, appears to be fairly static. This may be true if we are talking about an onion on your kitchen counter, but quite different if it is still in the ground, where the plant itself would be considered a biological complex, dynamic system in interaction with other systems. The layers of an onion are, in fact, modified leaves, the nature of which is the result first of evolutionary adaptations to the environment and later human‐manipulated mutations, so as to be domesticated for cultivation and human consumption. So, even though the main point of my use of van Lier's analogy was to illustrate the nested, interdependent nature of the pedagogical system I wanted to describe in this monograph, this broader description of the living onion in the contexts both of the world's ecosystems and human social and economic systems make it a particularly apt simile. It means that a complex, dynamic account of what happens in language classrooms is dependent on an expanded consideration of the aims of language education in terms of human capabilities; that human capabilities can be facilitated in large measure by creativity; that creative thinking is essential for orienting language pedagogy toward social justice and conflict transformation; that these other four require consideration of human compassion made feasible in the educational setting of the language classroom; that all of these are in complex interaction with one another; and that the entire system is interconnected and interdependent with other complex systems.

Agricultural or culinary analogies aside, the concepts and categories of a human ecological language pedagogy are intended to frame what teachers and learners do in language classrooms as fundamentally and profoundly connected to both the subjective experiences and histories of learners and to other spheres of our globalized, multifaceted, richly multilingual world, a world characterized by complex types of physical, social, cultural, linguistic, and digital mobilities. Pedagogies of the CLT era have sometimes oriented toward these other spheres and these mobilities, and in some ways have succeeded at it. For example, many of the descriptors of the CEFR as well as the ACTFL Standards imply a social and sociocultural focus (e.g., the ACTFL Communities standard or the more recent treatments of mediation in the CEFR; North & Piccardo, 2017). Yet I would argue that many aspects of contemporary pedagogies are built around the (primarily linguistic) development of the individual learner, without necessarily considering the learner to be first and foremost an emergent member of what Lave and Wenger (1991) described as a community of practice, with the community in question being in fact multiple and intricate (see also Wenger, 1998). For the language learner, not just the community of practice of the classroom is of relevance, but also of the society in which the learner is learning a new language and the society in which the learners’ new language is used. Lave and Wenger also put forth the idea of the learner as a “legitimate peripheral participant” in a new community of practice. This does not imply that there is such a thing as an ‘illegitimate’ peripheral participant, rather that a learner as newcomer is a bona fide and important—or legitimate—part of the community. The learner is also peripheral in Lave and Wenger's understanding, simply because she or he is still gaining knowledge needed to participate in the community of practice in question; peripheral in this sense is neither a value judgment nor a political statement about the learner. While the authors acknowledged there may be no such thing as ‘central’ participation, the concept of the legitimate peripheral participant is a way to understand the place of the learner relative to members of the community who possess a larger body of knowledge about or greater abilities in a given activity. The five main topics presented in this monograph—complexity, capabilities, creativity, conflict transformation, and compassion—allow for a simultaneous focus on the individual learner as well as the learner in the social and cultural ecology of which the learner is already an integral and legitimate part by virtue of learning a new language.

In the introduction I proposed that a human ecological approach could serve as a corrective to some of the ‘damage’ of globalization that Spivak (2013) identified in her critical treatment of education in the era of globalization, as a means of countering the persistence of neoliberal trends that have also impacted language education. This may have been an overly idealistic and possibly unrealistic assertion, even if I am not alone in having taken up the challenge to address some of the limitations and shortcomings of language education today. In this regard, one may assert that my ideas suggest a sort of kumbaya‐ism applicable to students who are ready, willing, and able to do the kinds of things that visionary educators would like them to do (David Block, personal communication, 9 April 2019). The chapters here appear to apply mostly in the middle‐class world of education with sufficient resources, whereas the vast majority of the educational contexts around the world have relatively few resources. While it is certainly true that in my own teaching and professional experiences I have been fortunate to work with abundant resources and with learners who are for the most part ready, willing, and able to do what we would like them to do, I hope I have been able to show that the tenets of a human ecological pedagogy are intended as a means of thinking about and designing curriculum with the diverse contingencies of local context in sharp focus. I began the book by observing that any teaching, whether by a teacher or on one's own, is always guided by a ‘pedagogy’ based on a set of assumptions or beliefs about the nature of language and language learning. In these chapters, I have hopefully shown how a human ecological language pedagogy can be applied even in settings with limited resources or with learners who may appear less than ready, willing, and able to do what the pedagogical approach presented here implies.

The human ecological language pedagogy described here hopefully also can serve as a corrective to ubiquitous modernist pedagogies that predominate in classrooms around the world. These pedagogies tend to be based on limited or limiting framings of language itself as a bounded set of discrete items to be acquired, language learning as a linear process from no knowledge to some approximation of native‐speaker norms, and classroom activity as practice in terms of largely transactional communication about things not necessarily of interest or importance to learners or relevant to the world beyond the classroom.

This declaration is a red thread through all of Leo's work, as well as of this monograph, and has inspired and guided me in my own career as I struggled to gain an understanding of the complexities of language classrooms and the messy realities of language learners’ experiences during their study abroad sojourns. Most recently I have turned my attention to language learners who are newcomers to Germany, some who came as refugees and some as what you might call more conventional immigrants, all endeavoring to learn the language and cultural norms of their new home. In experiencing the multilingual ecology of these classrooms, I have observed pedagogical practices that align with many of the ideas in this monograph, even if the teachers might not explicitly describe their pedagogies in these ways. The teachers of many Willkommensklassen [Welcome Classes] are clearly teaching beyond mere competences and skills, toward promoting human capabilities; they are fostering creativity in and through the learners’ new language, and in their aim to help these learners both ‘integrate’ into German society and also find their own voice in that society, are centrally concerned with pursuing social justice and both showing and fostering compassion. But it is exactly this variable level of explicitness with which I was concerned in this monograph, because many researchers and teachers of the young 21st century do seem attuned to a human ecological approach. This human ecological language pedagogy will hopefully serve, then, as a means of making those multifarious interconnections and dense interrelationships more explicit, in realizing the full potential of language learning and teaching in our age.

近年来，应用语言学的各种“转折”都使本专题的思想得以建立。这个领域扩大了对什么是语言本身以及学习如何发生的理解，包括社会，社会文化，社会认知，后结构主义，后殖民主义，以及最近对人的意义分析的后人类分析。在研究青少年和成年人学习新语言的过程的研究中，这些范式转变尤其富有成果。尽管许多研究人员已经成功地摆脱了结构主义理论的局限性认识论，但这提出了新的问题，即实证研究的方法论以及教育环境中理论与实践的联系。细读最近的应用语言学奖学金，以及美国和许多其他国家的学术会议计划也证明了这一点。现在，在会议走廊上的文章和章节，专栏，研究专栏和讨论，通常都将语言和语言学习视为复杂的动态系统，或者至少与学习者不断发展的中间语言或形式-意味映射一样多。这些仍然是调查的关键要素和对象。对于那些与语言教育有关的人来说，这项工作反映了一个正在进行的项目，该项目旨在扩大和深化教学的目标和预期结果，超越交易沟通和技能捆绑，尽管据我所知，很少有人以人的能力来构想该项目（参见Crosbie ，2014）。研究人员和其他类型的语言专业人员还关注以无数种方式来吸引学习者和教师的创造力，并通过语言教育来培养社会正义和人类同情心，尽管尽管后者不是公认的，但仍然隐含在内。我的希望是，本专着中提出的想法能够使理论实践付诸实践，并使语言教学法的某些方面对于语言学习者在教室内外进行的工作更加重要。

在与同事讨论本专题中介绍的教学方法时，有人评论说，导言中提到的范利安洋葱比喻可能不是解决系统复杂性，人的能力，创造力，冲突转换和同情心，因为它不一定表明这些嵌套级别相互影响和相互依赖的方式。毕竟，洋葱似乎是相当静态的。如果我们在您的厨房柜台上谈论的是洋葱，这可能是正确的，但是如果洋葱仍在地面上，则情况会大不相同，在这里植物本身被认为是与其他系统相互作用的生物复杂，动态的系统。实际上，洋葱的层是经过修饰的叶子，其本质是首先进化适应环境，然后是人类操纵的突变，从而被驯化用于耕种和人类消费的结果。因此，即使我使用范·里尔（Van Lier）类比的主要目的是说明我想在此专着中描述的教学系统的嵌套，相互依存的性质，但在世界生态系统和环境的背景下，对活洋葱的这种更广泛的描述人类的社会和经济体系使其特别贴切。这意味着对语言教室中发生的事情的复杂而动态的描述取决于对人类能力方面语言教育目标的扩展考虑；创造力可在很大程度上促进人的能力；创新思维对于将语言教学法导向社会正义和冲突转变至关重要；其他四项需要考虑在语言教室的教育环境中可行的人类同情心；所有这些相互之间都是复杂的互动；整个系统与其他复杂系统相互连接和相互依赖。

除了农业或烹饪类比之外，人类生态语言教学法的概念和类别旨在将教师和学习者在语言教室中所做的工作与学习者的主观体验和历史以及我们全球化的其他领域从根本上深刻地联系在一起，多方面的，多语言的世界，以物理，社会，文化，语言和数字移动性的复杂类型为特征的世界。CLT时代的教学法有时指向这些其他领域和这些活动，并且在某些方面取得了成功。例如，CEFR以及ACTFL标准的许多描述符意味着关注社会和社会文化（例如，ACTFL社区标准或CEFR中较新的调解方法； North＆Piccardo，2017年）。然而，我要指出的是，当代教学法的许多方面都是建立在个体学习者（主要是语言学）发展的基础上的，而不必认为学习者首先是Lave和Wenger（1991）所描述的社区的新生成员。实践中，所讨论的社区实际上是多重而错综复杂的（另请参见Wenger，1998）。对于语言学习者而言，不仅课堂实践社区是相关的，而且学习者正在学习一种新语言的社会以及使用学习者的新语言的社会也很重要。拉夫和温格还提出了在新的实践社区中将学习者视为“合法外围参与者”的想法。这并不意味着会有“非法的”外围参与者之类的事情，而是意味着作为新来者的学习者是社区的真诚和重要（或合法）的一部分。学习者在Lave和Wenger的理解中也处于外围地位，这仅仅是因为她或他仍在获得参与相关实践社区所需的知识。从这个意义上讲，外围学习既不是价值判断也不是关于学习者的政治陈述。尽管作者承认可能没有“中央”参与，合法外围参与者的概念是一种了解学习者相对于社区成员的位置的方式，社区成员在特定活动中拥有更多的知识或能力。本专着中介绍的五个主要主题（复杂性，能力，创造力，冲突转变和同情心）允许同时关注单个学习者以及社会和文化生态学中的学习者，而学习者已经是不可或缺的，通过学习一种新的语言来获得合法的部分。

我在引言中提出，人类生态学方法可以纠正Spivak（2013）在全球化时代对教育的批判性对待中对全球化的某些“损害”，以此作为对付持久性的一种手段。新自由主义的趋势也影响了语言教育。即使我不是一个人独自承担挑战以解决当今语言教育的某些局限性和不足之处，这也可能是过于理想化的主张，甚至可能是不现实的主张。在这方面，可能有人断言我的想法暗示着一种昆巴亚主义适用于准备，愿意并且能够做有远见的教育家希望他们做的事情的学生（David Block，个人通讯，2019年4月9日）。这里的各章似乎主要适用于拥有足够资源的中产阶级教育世界，而世界上绝大多数的教育背景都相对缺乏资源。当然，根据我自己的教学和专业经验，我很幸运能与丰富的资源和学习者一起工作，这些学习者在大多数情况下已经准备好，愿意并且能够做我们希望他们做的事情，但我希望我能能够表明，人类生态学教学的宗旨旨在作为一种思考和设计课程的手段，并以当地环境的各种突发事件为重点。在开始本书时，我观察到任何教学，无论是由老师还是自己进行的，都始终以“教学法”为指导，而“教学法”基于关于语言和语言学习性质的一系列假设或信念。在这些章节中，我希望展示了即使在资源有限的环境中或学习者看起来似乎还不够准备，乐于接受并能够做到此处提出的教学方法所暗示的目的的情况下，如何应用人类生态语言教学法。

希望这里描述的人类生态语言教学法也可以纠正世界各地教室中普遍存在的现代主义教学法。这些教学法倾向于基于有限的或有限的语言本身框架，将其作为有限制的离散项目集，将语言学习视为从无知识到以母语为准的近似线性过程，并将课堂活动作为实践关于事物的交流，主要是与学习者不一定感兴趣或无关紧要的事物或与课堂以外的世界相关的事物。

这一宣言是利奥所有工作以及专着的一条红线，在我努力理解语言教室的复杂性和语言学习者的凌乱现实的过程中，对我的职业生涯产生了启发和指导。出国留学期间的经历。最近，我将注意力转向了刚来到德国的语言学习者，一些以难民身份来到这里的人以及一些可以称为传统移民的人，他们都在努力学习新家的语言和文化规范。在体验这些教室的多语言生态时，我观察到了与本专着中的许多思想相吻合的教学实践，即使教师可能没有以这些方式明确描述他们的教学方法。许多老师Willkommensklassen[欢迎班]显然是在超越能力和技能的范围内进行教学，以提高人的能力；他们在学习者的新语言中和通过他们的新语言来培养创造力，目的是帮助这些学习者既“融入”德国社会，又在德国社会中找到自己的声音，主要关注追求社会正义以及展示和培养同情。但这正是我在本专着中所关注的明确程度的可变性，因为21世纪年轻的许多研究人员和教师似乎都已调和人类生态学方法。希望这种人类生态语言教学法可以作为一种手段，使这些多方面的相互联系和密集的相互关系更加明确，