ABSTRACT This article reports on a community-outreach puppet show implemented in an advanced Korean language course at a U.S. university. The project was designed to enhance students’ linguistic proficiency, cultural understanding, and civic engagement through the integration of Korean folktales, collaborative script writing, and public performance. Over the course of the semester, students studied a Korean folktale, co-authored an original script, constructed puppets, and performed the show in Korean for approximately 300 students at a local Korean dual language immersion (DLI) elementary school. Rather than prioritizing grammatical accuracy, the project foregrounded meaningful language use, creativity, and communicative effectiveness through interaction with a real audience. Informed by the principles of project-based learning and performance-based pedagogy, the experience provided advanced learners with a concrete communicative purpose and a socially situated context for language use. The elementary school students, in turn, expressed excitement and a sense of pride in understanding the Korean performance, which inspired them to envision their own language-learning journey. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale, instructional design, and implementation process of the project and analyzes student learning outcomes. It argues that community-based performance projects can foster learner motivation, intercultural understanding, and meaningful language use.
Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL) is often associated with large-scale partnerships beyond the classroom, which can make its implementation appear resource-intensive and difficult to sustain. This article reconceptualizes CBLL as a scalable pedagogical framework that begins within students' immediate academic communities and gradually extends to campus, local, and global contexts. Drawing on instructional examples across these four levels of community engagement, the study illustrates how CBLL can be meaningfully integrated into language curricula without requiring extensive external infrastructure. Central to this framework is the role of pedagogical mediation, particularly critical reflection, which enables learners to interpret community participation as a site of learning rather than as a peripheral activity. Through selected student cases, the article demonstrates how critically mediated CBLL experiences can foster learner agency, sustained community engagement, and the transfer of learning beyond formal instruction. Rather than directly assessing learning outcomes or linguistic gains, this study focuses on conceptualizing CBLL as a continuum of engagement and highlighting design principles that support its pedagogical feasibility. By emphasizing accessibility, intentional design, and reflection, this article offers language educators a flexible model for implementing CBLL across diverse instructional contexts.
This article presents a case study from an advanced Korean language course at Wellesley College in the United States, examining how Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL) can be integrated into curricular design and task architecture. CBLL was operationalized through a jointly designed global seminar with Hokkai School of Commerce in Japan, using Korean as a shared medium for intercultural communication, collaborative inquiry, and community formation. The curriculum combined genre-based instruction and project-based learning, informed by Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), Students as Partners (SaP), translanguaging, and experiential learning. Student reflections and instructor observations were analyzed to examine learning outcomes. Findings indicate gains in linguistic precision, confidence in using diverse registers, critical literacy, and intercultural empathy. Collaborative discussions, translanguaging presentations, and creative projects-including journals and bookmaking-functioned as reflective and knowledge-building practices. Interaction across synchronous and asynchronous modes, virtual collaboration, and shared creative production produced learning outcomes comparable to local, in-person CBLL while expanding access and participation. The study highlights the potential of integrating CBLL with COIL to support inclusive, scalable, and sustainable community-connected language learning and to cultivate linguistically competent, critically literate, and socially engaged global learners.
