This volume aims to provide an overview of some of the available examples of relationships between language learning and citizenship education, within the multifaceted and rapidly increasing connectivity that characterises the global community at the present time.

Language learning in its fullest sense has never been simply set of systems and rules, it has always been a form of trying to express through language the deepest essence of diverse human groups, forging relationships and bonds between individuals, communities and cultures. This is no less true today amidst the challenges that threaten to alienate social groups from one another, contrasting at the same time with the unprecedented technological opportunities for reaching out beyond local and national borders. In the context of these challenges and opportunities, active civic participation is fundamental to strengthening the fabric of society promoting cohesion and collaboration. Language education and language teachers are placed centre stage in the mission to prepare students to maintain and be able to contribute with their own richness to the pluralistic, multilingual and multicultural global environment of today. To this end, language learners require more than ever the attitudes and skills of consideration of the otherness; the curiosity to ask questions about the unfamiliar in the endeavour to understand it and not to pre-conceive it; an appreciation for other ways of life; a willingness to self-reflect and critically examine their own perceptions, values, assumptions; a clear sense of their own identity and values, from which they can have the confidence to appreciate those of others; a sense of responsibility as an intercultural citizen; and a desire to fulfil those responsibilities in society in different ways, for the flourishing of individuals and the communities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

A majority of language teachers appears to support the idea that language learning not only has an instrumental purpose that may well go beyond the mere learning of the rules of a particular language, but that also may embrace a deeper educative purpose (Porto, Houghton and Byram 2017). This is clear from the data presented in Chapter 6 and it is supported by a range of studies conducted in recent decades.