Task engagement in the English language classroom

Linda Gijsen

English Language Teaching (ELT) should arguably primarily involve preparing learners for using the language as a lingua franca in real world communication. Consequently, educating learners to become communicatively competent users of English in international and intercultural communication has implications for the way in which English language learning activities should be organised and how we want learners to engage with tasks in an all-inclusive language learning context. Although in theory an intercultural communicative orientation should be anchored in many ELT curricula, in practice, many classroom-based interactions still primarily evolve around native-speaker language expressions and do not expand on learners’ existing socio-cultural and mulitilingual repertoire. In this presentation, I will examine how technology in the form of virtual pedagogical lingua franca exchange can be used to manage linguistic diversity and foster engagement in the ELT classroom.