Introduction to the Special Issue: Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL) in Korean Language Education

It all began with the 2025 American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK) Annual Conference, held in Honolulu, Hawai’i, in June 2025 under the theme “Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of AATK: Building a Global Community for a New Era.” This milestone event provided a meaningful venue for participants to reflect on past accomplishments, examine present challenges, and envision future directions in Korean language education. The conference not only honored the legacy of Korean language education in North America but also aspired to actively shape its future by building local and global communities of Korean language educators. Over the past three decades, AATK has grown into a vital organization that fosters excellence in Korean language education among its more than 300 members. From its early beginnings, AATK has expanded its reach by connecting educators and scholars, developing innovative pedagogical approaches, and advocating for the advancement of Korean language programs across the American continent and beyond.This 30th anniversary thus marked a critical opportunity to reassess the field’s evolving goals and possibilities. Rapid technological developments—particularly in digital communication and artificial intelligence (AI)—have transformed how Korean language educators collaborate and build communities across geographical, institutional, and national boundaries. As a result, the notion of a global community of Korean language education is no longer aspirational but increasingly palpable. In this context, the conference and this special issue seek to explore how language education can foster intercultural competence and collaborative knowledge production in an increasingly interconnected world.Guided by this vision, the conference showcased contributions that engage with pedagogical, cultural, and technological dimensions of Korean language education within the Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL) framework. The articles collected in this volume reflect these goals and values. Together, they demonstrate how Korean language education is evolving through community-based learning, global networking, experiential pedagogy, creative and digital practices, and institutional collaboration. They also reveal how the field is responding to technological innovation and the increasing importance of ethical, inclusive, and socially engaged education. Ultimately, this volume embodies the spirit of the conference theme: collectively imagining and building a more connected and globally engaged community for Korean language education.CBLL has gained renewed urgency as instructors seek to connect classroom learning with meaningful social participation. While the World-Readiness Standards and the National Standards for Korean Language Learning have long emphasized the five Cs—Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities—many programs have experienced uneven implementation of these goals. Unlike the other Cs, Communities has tended to lag behind, in part because it often requires forms of expertise and partnership that extend beyond the traditional scope of language teaching. At the same time, the past decade—especially the pandemic-era shift to online and hybrid instruction—has fundamentally reshaped what counts as “community,” expanding it beyond local or study-abroad contexts to include virtual and transregional networks formed around shared projects across institutions and sustained interaction between learners and community members.This special issue of The Korean Language in America responds to that pedagogical and institutional momentum. Collectively, the contributions show that CBLL is not a single method but a coherent and flexible framework for designing learning environments in which students use Korean for authentic interaction, collaboration, and contribution—locally and globally. Across the articles, CBLL is presented not only as an instructional approach but also as a way to align curricular goals with lived experience: learners develop linguistic and intercultural competence through people-centered engagement, reflective practice, and purposeful participation in multilingual communities “at home and around the world.” The studies and pedagogical reports also underscore a key practical insight: CBLL becomes sustainable when it is supported by assessment frameworks that make learning visible—through multimodal portfolios, reflection writing, surveys, digital productions, presentations, peer feedback, and community-facing outputs.The eight articles in this volume are organized into three thematic clusters, moving from curricular integration, to transformative learning, and finally to classroom-to-community enactment.Part 1 examines how CBLL can be embedded into course design and institutional structures—especially in contexts where “community” has traditionally been treated as an add-on rather than a core component of the curriculum.In “Bringing Communities into the KFL Classroom Through Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL),” Cho, Chun, Moon, and Park (Rutgers) address the challenge of implementing the Communities goal, especially in lower-level curricula. They argue that multimodal technology, online resources, and social networking enable educators to reimagine community as something that can be cultivated without partnering with an external organization. They demonstrate how instructors can utilize existing academic communities (e.g., study sessions, language tables, learner libraries, cultural events) as an entry point for CBLL and how the scope of these communities can be expanded to integrate community engagement into the curriculum, connecting it to classroom practices and learning. A central contribution is their emphasis on pairing CBLL with students’ critical reflection to align engagement with learning outcomes.In “Creating Global Communities to Expand Opportunities to Learn Korean: A Collaborative Model for Virtual Korean Language Education,” Lee (GSU), Rodriguez (UH Mānoa), Hernandez (UH Mānoa), Hart (North Carolina Virtual Public School), Lee (UNG), and Noh (Sejong Campus High School) focus on infrastructural and institutional collaboration. Their multipartnership initiative illustrates how CBLL can be scaled through networked course development and professional development for teachers, positioning the community as something built among learners, institutions, and educators alike.Part 2 highlights how CBLL reshapes learners’ identities and roles, moving students from language users in training toward contributors, collaborators, and creators.Choi’s (Toronto) “Integrating Service-Learning in Korean Language Education: Three Case Studies” presents service-learning as an experiential pathway that integrates community engagement with academic objectives, emphasizing contribution, reflection, and sustained participation. Drawing on multiple cases such as students serving as teaching assistants, contributing to research-based reporting for public institutions, and supporting online language instruction, this study emphasizes the pedagogical value of contribution: learners use Korean for real tasks, revise through feedback cycles, and reflect on participation in ways that deepen both proficiency and civic responsibility. The article also speaks directly to the field’s current needs by articulating practical benefits and constraints, offering a grounded argument for service-learning as a sustainable CBLL strategy in Korean programs.Lee (Wellesley) and Lee (Hokkai School of Commerce), in “From Classroom to Community: Integrated CBLL in Advanced Korean,” showcase an advanced-level course organized around modern Korean narratives across diverse genres, including webtoons, film/drama scripts, poetry, essays, and short fiction. Their approach foregrounds multimodal and digital literacy while also emphasizing global collaboration and translanguaging practices. Particularly notable is the way global networking is operationalized through structured student-led seminars and public-facing events, demonstrating how CBLL can transform advanced language learning into collaborative knowledge-building and creative production.Son (UBC) and Park’s (NYU) “Translocal Community-Based Language Learning: A Digitally Mediated Online Travel Fair for Korean Language Learners” introduces the “Online Travel Fair,” an interuniversity role-play project that builds as-if communities and cross-campus networks for authentic interaction. The project demonstrates how CBLL can be strengthened through cross-institutional networking: students gain linguistic confidence, compare learning strategies across campuses, and begin building relationships that extend beyond the boundaries of any single classroom.Part 3 turns to concrete classroom and community-facing practices—showing how CBLL can be enacted through arts integration, AI-mediated creative production, talent donation, digital culture, and performance-based outreach.Kim (UT Austin) and Kim (Ajou University), in “The Living Museums Project: Integrating Contemporary Korean Art into Korean Language Education Through Global Virtual Exchange,” propose an interdisciplinary model that connects content-based learning, contemporary Korean art, and global virtual exchange. Their “Living Museum” theme creates pathways for learners to engage with major contemporary artists and museum education practices while developing Korean through reflective writing, bilingual exchange, storytelling, and digital production. The article illustrates how CBLL can thrive when language educators collaborate with specialists (in this case, art faculty and museum educators) to expand cultural engagement and motivate sustained language use.Cho (Rochester), in “Enhancing Language and Cultural Learning Through Community Service: Talent Donation,” addresses the practical challenge of implementing community engagement in areas with limited Korean-speaking populations. By adapting the service-learning model toward “learning by teaching,” students provide Korean language and culture experiences to local middle school learners who otherwise lack access. This “talent donation” framework rethinks community as a relationship of contribution and responsibility while also creating structured opportunities for learners to consolidate their own knowledge through teaching.Finally, Lee (UNG), in “Bringing Korean Folktales to Life: Student-Produced Puppet Shows for Community Engagement,” demonstrates how performance-based pedagogy can become a powerful CBLL practice. By shifting from personal childhood stories to Korean folktales, students engage more deeply with culturally embedded language, collaborate to script and build puppets, and perform for a local elementary school audience. The project culminates in intergenerational exchange through Q&A sessions, highlighting how learners’ communicative competence and cultural understanding can grow through real audiences, shared storytelling, and reflective practice.Taken together, these articles present CBLL as both a pedagogical orientation and a field-expanding agenda. They broaden the meaning of community to include campus groups, local and diaspora communities, virtual transnational networks, digital publics, and service relationships, and ultimately invite readers to rethink CBLL not as enrichment but as a principled alignment of curriculum, assessment, and language use in action.We hope these contributions offer both inspiration and practical guidance, including adaptable models, concrete project designs, and a shared vocabulary for making Korean language learning matter beyond the classroom.Finally, we note that several additional innovative works were presented at the conference, including Sunmi Jung Oh’s (Drexel) study on AI-powered creative song-making and collaboration. Although time and other constraints prevent their inclusion here, such works point toward future directions for CBLL in digitally mediated learning environments.

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