Communicative Competences and Language Learning in an Ecological Perspective. The Triple Contexts of Participation and Language Learning from Childhood to Adulthood

this paper we discuss a basic question of language education from an ecological perspective : How can language education (mother tongue, second language, international language, and foreign language) contribute to friendly and fair cooperation within and across places, regions and nations, ethnicity, gender/sex and age and to a fruitful childhood, creativeness and democracy? (cf. van Lier, 2004). Thus, we discuss communicative competences and language education in an era of globalization and migration, focusing on the need for communicative competences related to communication in intra-cultural, inter-cultural as well as trans-cultural contexts. These three prototypical contexts embrace three different and dialectically interconnected life forms and language and education practices and policies, and they encourage different processes