This article argues for understanding the construct of experience as a complex adaptive system since experience, as a process, encapsulates other events that permeate it, bringing them to the fore. To this end, we briefly review research on experience and present excerpts from students’ and teachers’ report data of events experienced in the foreign language classrooms as empirical evidence of applying complexity theory concepts to understand the processes of foreign language teaching and learning. Thus, the explicit relationship between experience, as a construct, and chaos / complexity, as a theory, play a role for understanding the nature of classroom foreign language teaching and learning.
experiences; foreign language teaching and learning; caos and complexity
