Although I have spent a lot of time emphasizing the importance of environment to our community, let me be clear: The primary purpose of all this emphasis is the ultimate facilitation of communication, and the pursuit and accomplishment of meaningful language work. As employment is described in the following statement, so I wish to describe school and, more specifically, each class, as the context in which our own work occurs; that it "…meets enduring human needs for time, structure, activity, social contacts, participation in a collective purpose, and knowledge of one's place in society."
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With this unit, I want to provide a structure for how to be a language learner in this new world we are creating together. Without that structure, we are left with little more than a string of communicative activities and some nice ideas.
One of the biggest obstacles to language learning is fear of making mistakes. I talk to students about the importance of leaving behind the need for perfection, that the whole process of learning language is a series of errors followed by corrections, and that the process of making the mistake actually helps you learn the correct way. We also talk about how I will purposefully make it so that no one understands every single word I say, because part of the skill of a language learner is how to make meaning when you don't know every word, how to use context clues, and most importantly, how to stick with it when you are confused and overwhelmed. But these are all tough concepts for my new language learners to wrap their brains around. I think by framing it in this idea of building our new world and building guidelines for how to be here, that I can get the idea across better than I previously have.
To borrow a term from the literary world, I hope to create a sort of immersive fiction for my students, an all-encompassing and fully engaging world of comfort, safety, language learning and necessary language usage. This world will be created, artificial but believable because the core values will be reflected in the details of the surroundings. The problem with some language-learning activities, even the really fun ones and the really authentic ones, is that they are isolated islands that don't feel connected to the whole. And just speaking the language 100% of the time doesn't remedy that, because that often ends up alienating students who feel insecure and confused and don't yet know how to make sense in a setting like that. But if I can create a world that requires our language use and protects the comfort level of the student, then students will be able to grow and thrive in it, progressing appropriately at their own paces.
There are many resources online that name important elements of worldbuilding, but since they are written for fiction writers looking to create and write a believable fantasy world, they must be culled for what elements we can consider in creating our 3D language-learning world. To these, I have added some of the elements of community that I consider important to emphasize in the creation of our world. The following is my synthesized list of language-learning community worldbuilding elements: Believability and Purpose, Authentic and Comprehensible Language, Rules and Values, Systems of Order, Roles, Rituals, Place and Space, Sensory Appeal, and Boundaries. In each of the following sections I will discuss pertinent aspects of each element as well as some specific strategies for approaching and implementing them in the classroom.
