Learning Communities: A Project to Enhance the Development of English Communicative Competence

Abstract

Educational communities are understood as a group of people who participate in the learning processes of an educational institution, academic center, or school. Accordingly, in this review article, the current theory about learning communities and their possible influence on English communicative competence are bonded together through discussion. This, in order to understand how learning community projects, represent a twist from traditional and hegemonic approaches towards a situated and community approach to contextualize practices aimed at the development of English communicative competence. This document adopts the interpretive paradigm and a qualitative approach as its epistemological, ontological, methodological, and axiological basis. Likewise, document research was chosen as its qualitative social research strategy. In this sense, two techniques were selected for data collection and analysis: document review and content analysis. The consulted databases were Scopus, Scielo, EBSCO, Springer Journal, and Google Scholar, and, out of 90 documents selected, 70 were reviewed. It can be said that learning communities are arriving in Latin America. Furthermore, it was found that, with the active participation of all members social realities and conditions can change. As a conclusion, English can be – and needs to be – approached from the appropriation and adaptation of knowledge, contents, competences, language policies, and local needs, i.e., English in Colombia should be taught and learned based on down-top approaches rather than on top-down ones.