Reflections on Dialogism and Doing Community in the L2 Classroom

Abstract

While group work is commonly discussed as an important aspect of communicative language teaching, its configuration is usually considered to be small groups of students rather than an entire group of course participants. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1984; Holquist, 2002), this paper explores a view of group work as potential community building activity in the L2 classroom through the use of a group reflection tool involving the whole class.