Always-worth-reading George Siemens bucks the trend and makes the case that most learning is not social.

Now it’s pretty clear that language learning is a special subset of “learning” in general, and that the communicative essence of language learning pushes it way over towards the social end of the learning spectrum. Given.

But as language teachers we limit our effectiveness by overplaying the “social learning” card. This can happen in two ways:

1) Just because an activity is somehow “social” doesn’t mean it’s automatically good. “Let’s get our students in a chat room and they can communicate across borders!” is not necessarily going to be a productive use of our learners’ time because it’s social in nature. Activities such as this require careful preparation and set-up. Cultural factors may undermine effectiveness, as may student expectations (Paige Ware offers a fascinating diagnosis of what can go wrong, and why).

2) And if an activity is not “social”, then it’s not automatically inferior. AJ Hoge has some nice stuff on extensive reading and its value to acquisition (here’s the first one I could dig up). Self-directed solo activities can be immensely rewarding; reading, browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music…all provide rich input and are a wonderful component of any course.

This is not an argument against the social nature of language learning. The point is that we should select, design and deploy activities carefully, based on their intrinsic value, not on an easy fit into a over-generalized social learning paradigm.