TY - JOUR AU - Griffiths, Ed AU - Slavkov, Nikolay PY - 2021/05/31 Y2 - 2024/03/19 TI - Linguistic Risk-Taking: A Bridge Between the Classroom and the Outside World JF - Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics JA - CJAL VL - 24 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.37213/cjal.2021.31308 UR - https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/31308 SP - 127-158 AB - <p>This article describes an initiative launched at a Canadian bilingual university in order to encourage L2 French and L2 English learners to take ‘linguistic risks’: authentic, autonomous communicative acts where learners are pushed out of their linguistic comfort zone. The initiative was operationalized through the development of a Linguistic Risk-Taking Passport, which contains 74 linguistic risks that students can take in their L2 across the university campus and in their everyday life. An analysis of interviews with participating teachers (<em>n</em>=6) and learner self-report data from completed passports (<em>n</em>=410) examines how the initiative was integrated into the classroom and which passport items were perceived by students as particularly high-risk. A cyclical process of risk-taking within a broad Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) framework is described in which risks are viewed as learner-selected tasks with a dynamic affective slant; risks can be used to connect classroom learning with real-life L2 use and vice versa. The data illustrate that linguistic risk-taking can help TBLT practitioners generate ideas on how to narrow the gap between the classroom and the real-world. The article concludes with a list of practical implications and suggestions for adapting linguistic risk-taking to other institutional contexts.</p> ER -