Language Learning in the Community: A Bridge for Social Cohesion
摘要
This chapter will look at pedagogical approaches that include community service learning (CSL) as an integral part of language learning process. The CSL model puts language learners in direct contact with reality and allows them to tackle new, concrete challenges involved in learning a discipline, while testing their commitment to the community. To strengthen the learning process, the tasks accomplished in the community context must be meaningful and satisfy students’ motivational needs. In addition, students reflect on their experience through various parameters inherent to the language learning process. Their reflection deepens and enhances a learning process geared toward their future, the skills they are meant to acquire throughout their university program and the challenges posed by society, both today and tomorrow. To illustrate the CSL model at work, we will look at analyses of journals of students at a Canadian university. These journals relate the CSL experience embedded in their language courses. These analyses and institutional surveys show that the use of CSL in language learning incidentally fosters many individual and social cohesion dimensions that stretch the learning beyond the desired linguistic outcomes, allowing students to become social actors and mediators, within citizens’ responsibilities and leadership community projects.