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The Impact of Mediation and the Action-oriented Approach on Language Education: The Learner’s Voice

For decades now, the teaching of an additional language is predominantly based on the development of four linguistic skills: Listening, Speaking Reading, Writing (Fox, Cheng, & Zumbo, 2014). A much-needed paradigm shift from skills to modes of communication, namely reception, interaction, production, and mediation, was initiated by the seminal Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001) and the revised Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020) with illustrative descriptors that operationalize the use of these modes for immediate classroom application (North & Piccardo, 2016). Despite the growing interest in the concepts of the CEFR, particularly in mediation, there is a lack of empirical studies that focuses on the implication and on the learners’ experience on mediation-based tasks in the language classroom. This talk presents the findings of a qualitative study with 12 adult participants, enrolled in an English for Academic Preparation program in Ontario, Canada, who completed online 5 researcher-designed mediation-based, Action-Oriented tasks (Piccardo & North, 2019) in small groups, and were required to collaborate, to mediate text, concepts, communication, to use mediation strategies, to explain new ideas, to adapt a text, and to create a final artifact for each task. Qualitative data were collected from the transcription of video recordings of task completion, participants’ individual interviews, participants’ self-assessments as well as researcher and peer-researchers’ task observations. Findings reinforce that mediation and the Action-oriented Approach motivate learners, and also reveal an increase in learners’ social agency with strong promise for language education.