Language learning with TikTok’s ‘Duet’: a spatial perspective on digital technology and language learning

Global social media have become spaces for informal interaction and foreign language learning. Popular visual social media platforms like TikTok often use technological innovations to offer more affordances for users to shape interactional spaces. However, limited research has been conducted on how visual social media platforms are shaped by interactional spaces created by users and their implications for language learning. To fill this gap, this study explores how TikTokers use the platform’s Duet feature to create digital language learning spaces and how they mediate interactions across physical boundaries and languages through the screen. In-depth analysis of two representative Duet posts selected from a systematically coded dataset was conducted, applying spatial perspectives on digital technology and language learning. The analysis drew on key aspects of digital space: integrated geography, global networks, screenspace, and a sense of connectedness between screens and participants. Findings revealed how participants created their own interaction space for language learning activities on a Duet split-screen, and how this digital learning space manifested as global geographical spaces through the screenspace. The screen was not just a surface on which moving images were projected but a space within which multimodal learning was experienced interactively. This study provides insights into how language learners utilise TikTok’s innovation via mobile screen technology to create affordances for learning through different uses of space.