Situated cognition is the theory that people’s knowledge is embedded in the activity, context, and culture in which it was learned. It is also referred to as “situated learning.”1

Imagine being immersed in an unfamiliar situation, with all senses actively engaged in seeking to understand what is happening. For example, imagine that you trying to learn Korean. Your first step may be to take a beginner’s course where you will learn the Korean alphabet and the most commonly used expressions such as “Hello, how are you?”, “My name is…”, “Thank you”, “Goodbye”, etc. Hopefully your instructor will be a native or near-native speaker so that you learn these expressions with a correct accent. At some point though, you may want to immerse yourself in a Korean-speaking environment where you will have no other choice but to let go of your native language and be forced to make sense of your new surroundings. In this way, you will not only learn the language but also the tone, the rhythm and the body language associated with Korean… You will also get to experience other aspects of this culture such as the food, the smells, the lifestyle, the tastes and preferences, the games, etc. As all of these aspects of Korean life become a part of you, you may at some point find yourself unable to express a specific idea or feeling in any other language but Korean because you will have learnt it in a Korean context.

Situated Cognition embraces the concepts of Active Learning and Multimodal Learning as it “promotes learning by doing and learning through experience in authentic contexts.” 2 Situated Cognition also incorporates the concept of Communities of Practice as the “situated nature of learning requires new knowledge to be practiced in social and collaborative contexts.” 2

We may not be able to move to Seoul tomorrow in order to learn Korean, but we can attempt to recreate as immersive an environment as possible at home. We may watch Korean movies, go to Korean restaurants and try to make Korean friends. The Internet provides additional opportunities, sometimes at no cost, to meet Koreans online and do language exchange sessions. In the case of language learning, these opportunities are more easily accessible to people who already have a solid intermediate to upper-intermediate level.

An instructor will be able to facilitate the process of language learning, especially for lower-level students, by setting up the scaffolding around incremental language acquisition3. The instructor can easily access and show videos to introduce new language. He or she can assign regular exchanges with native speakers via Web Conferencing software in order to use target language in a “real world” context. The language instructor can then ask the participants to report back to the class on what they’ve learnt from their distance “partner”.

According to Mike Borkent, Barbara Dancygier, and Jennifer Hinnell in the article “Language and the Creative Mind”, processes involved in learning a language are similar to other types of knowledge acquisition: “the cognitive pathways of meaning construction described in the context of language use might be, to a large degree, the same pathways that our minds follow in processing visual artifacts, performative events, literary texts, and so on.”4

1. krist2366, "Situated Cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid)," in Learning Theories, February 2, 2017, https://www.learning-theories.com/situated-cognition-brown-collins-duguid.html.
2. http://www.angelachristopher.net/situated-cognition.html
3. http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Situated_Cognition/Learning_Theory
4. Language and the Creative Mind, Mike Borkent, Barbara Dancygier, and Jennifer Hinnell. 2013, CSLI Publications.