The Social Action-oriented Approach: Linking Goals to Practice

The social action-oriented approach has the goal of training learners as democratic citizens and productive professionals who can make society together and work together effectively in the outside world by leading them to act as democratic citizens and productive professionals of their class micro-society/micro-workplace. While task-based language teaching holds the principle that learners learn to communicate in the outside world by communicating in the classroom, the social action-oriented approach holds the principle that learners learn to act together in the outside world by acting together in and/or outside the classroom, where communication is no longer both the means and the goal as in task-based language teaching but just a means at the service of social action. Since pedagogical projects and mini-projects are the best models of social action in the social action-oriented approach, a concrete mini-project will be presented to illustrate how such a goal is linked to practice in the social action-oriented approach.