Professional Documents
Culture Documents
edu/en/web/ecodal/glosario-enfoque-orientado-a-la-accion
The action-oriented approach is the conceptual basis of the proposal by the Council of
Europe’s CEFR (2001 and 2008), which “is an action-oriented one in so far as it views
users and learners of a language primarily as ‘social agents’, i.e. members of society
who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of
circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action” (CEFR,
2001, p. 9, chapter 2). Regarding the performance of these tasks, the action-oriented
approach takes into account the person’s cognitive, emotional, and volitional resources,
as well as all the set of specific abilities the person applies as a social agent. An action-
oriented approach attaches great importance to formulating the learning goals in terms
of competences.
According to Esteve and Martín Peris (2013), Negueruela (2013), and Lantolf and
Poehner (2014) learning an additional language requires not only using it in
communicative acts, but also reflecting consciously on how messages are formulated in
that language and, therefore, on the semiotic concepts underlying communicative acts.
As a result of this, work in the classroom must be done considering two dimensions,
which are closely related: on the one hand, the sociocultural dimension, which involves
the use of language in communicative situations; and on the other, the cognitive
dimension, ehich involves the mental mechanisms that the learner activates when trying
to express something in a language different from their own. Those mechanisms
translate into metalinguistic and metadiscursive reflection, which serves to make the
learner aware of the criteria and indicators of achievement of the communicative action
undertaken.
References