The Languaging Curriculum in Practice: Communicating Successfully on Social Media

The languaging curriculum involves learning to strategically make use of available tools and resources to successfully do things with English for real-world purposes. In this article, we describe how languaging was implemented in a task where students communicate about a hobby of their choice on Reddit discussion forums. Over three weeks, the students learned to analyse existing posts on the Reddit forums and to apply language use strategies, tools and resources to interact successfully with other hobby enthusiasts. Data gathered from the students’ learning reflections suggest that the aims of this innovative task were achieved. The students engaged in successful real-world communication, changed their attitudes towards the nature of English and English language learning, and learnt how to exploit existing examples to produce their own effective contributions. More than half of the students were still communicating on Reddit six months after the end of the course. Two key challenges were identified that require further research: the need for teachers to change their beliefs about the nature of language teaching, especially the importance of accuracy; and problems with how to assess students’ successful communication.