From Classroom to Community: Integrated CBLL in Advanced Korean

This article presents a case study from an advanced Korean language course at Wellesley College in the United States, examining how Community-Based Language Learning (CBLL) can be integrated into curricular design and task architecture. CBLL was operationalized through a jointly designed global seminar with Hokkai School of Commerce in Japan, using Korean as a shared medium for intercultural communication, collaborative inquiry, and community formation. The curriculum combined genre-based instruction and project-based learning, informed by Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), Students as Partners (SaP), translanguaging, and experiential learning. Student reflections and instructor observations were analyzed to examine learning outcomes. Findings indicate gains in linguistic precision, confidence in using diverse registers, critical literacy, and intercultural empathy. Collaborative discussions, translanguaging presentations, and creative projects—including journals and bookmaking—functioned as reflective and knowledge-building practices. Interaction across synchronous and asynchronous modes, virtual collaboration, and shared creative production produced learning outcomes comparable to local, in-person CBLL while expanding access and participation. The study highlights the potential of integrating CBLL with COIL to support inclusive, scalable, and sustainable community-connected language learning and to cultivate linguistically competent, critically literate, and socially engaged global learners.