“Action-oriented Approach (AA)” as a new teaching method has taken an important role in teaching and learning of French Education during past 10 years. However, even though the new teaching method is very welcome for educators, now it is the time that we have to consider whether the key principle and fundamental notion of this approach is suitable for our language education environments and is theoretically appropriate for education. For that, it is necessary that we have to carefully examine this “Action-oriented Approach” from two points of views. First of all, from the angle of foreign language education, we need to verify whether this new approach could be appropriately applied in teaching and learning of Korean foreign language education or not. Secondly, from a societal perspective, we need to examine how this method, considering language education as everyday life itself, can handle some critical perspectives in the point of “status in quo” of “AA”. It has been criticized that language education as everyday life itself can make learners in everyday life to unconsciously acquire maintaining the ‘status quo’ during actions such as “educational inequality”. It is expected that this kind of examination will suggest us an improved way of “AA” for more effective and appropriate practice of French Education, and will give us an opportunity to think about the better way of teaching and learning model by “AA” in Korea.

This paper examines one child’s L2 (speaking and writing) development in social contexts of learning over a six-month period from the age of seven years and five months. It describes L2 development during the first months of the child’s schooling and interprets it in terms of a socio-semantic approach to language learning. The study, which adopts a qualitative approach in an interpretivist/constructionist research paradigm, entailed the collection and interpretation of data through multiple sources: observation, interviews, and written and spoken texts. The analytical framework is provided by systemic functional linguistics and an overall theoretical framework is formed by Vygotsky’s and Halliday’s theories. The results show that the child’s ability to encode meaning became increasingly rich over the research period; the child’s meaning making potential expanded and her thinking became conscious as her L2 developed. The child’s L2 learning took place in social contexts involving herself with others. The paper argues that these social relationships substantially drove the child’s L2 development, in addition to effectively enhancing her writing and speaking, suggesting that the language learner needs to learn to use language in social interaction.