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This article aims to contribute to an understanding of how social and institutional factors affect the language learning environments of university students studying less-commonly taught languages (Turner, 1958), at beginner level by distance online. The empirical material is drawn from longitudinal case studies of students who enrolled in beginner-level distance courses in LCTLs at a regional Swedish university in the early 2010s. The study supports previous research illustrating the importance of sociocultural factors in learning activities. Furthermore, the study adds to research showing that for LCTLs an online learning context provides affordances that simply may not exist in campus settings and makes the study of LCTLs accessible to people for whom it would otherwise not be, an important contribution to linguistic diversity. The novel finding of this study is the direct and clearly articulated effect of different policies and frameworks on individuals’ choices of how, when and where to study, which suggests a need to examine further the ways that government and supranational entities shape the decisions made by adult learners.

The purpose of this report is to contribute to an understanding of the technological, institutional, and social conditions that affect language learning and the different ways that adults can undertake the activity of language learning over two to four years within these conditions.Data for this report was collected between 2012 and 2016 from twelve learners enrolled in beginner-level courses in foreign languages taught by distance at a regional Swedish university. From asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated interviews over this period, a narrative of each subject’s learning process was constructed to illustrate language learning contexts and trajectories. These contexts and trajectories are  conceptualized through the personal learning environment (PLE) placed in an activity-theory (AT) framework. This report reveals some of the contradictory pressures that teachers, curricula, institutions, social welfare systems and ICT can exert on a PLE. Adult foreign language learners’ PLEs and trajectories within university distance education in Sweden in the 2010s can take many different configurations depending on an individual learner’s own goals and personal objectives, location, and even health.