The second workshop of CEFR Online Workshop Series 2022 entitled "The learner as social agent: Implications for curriculum design and classroom practice" took place on Thursday, 3 March 2022.
The workshop reflected current deliberations as to the aims and outcomes of language education. The construct of social agency as key to responsible and effective language use in interaction and mediation was discussed. This is rooted in the idea that language users are independent and responsible participants in society. "Social agents" use languages to create, negotiate and mediate meaning in the real world. Thus, social agency goes further than mere communicative competence, as it fully reflects the multimodalities of interactional and communicative realities, purposes and contexts of real-world language use.
The workshop also reflected how language education might evolve towards creating learning contexts that encourage learners to grow in their role as social agents, as autonomous and responsible language users.
The workshop was moderated by Dr Bernd Rüschoff. Dr Rüschoff is senior professor in the Applied Linguistics & EFL section of the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has been involved in numerous Council of Europe projects and is a former President of AILA – the International Association for Applied Linguistics.
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Watch the Presentation (26:50)
Watch the Discussion (55:28)
