In 2004, the authors began a qualitative study into the value of community 
placements as sites of sociocultural and sociolinguistic learning among English as an 
Additional Language (EAL) learners studying a Bachelor of Arts degree. Students 
undertook community placements of ten hours, and wrote reflective journals detailing 
their observations of and participation in social, cultural and linguistic interactions. 
This paper reports on the key findings of the project over the past three years. It also 
applies the notion of “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to community 
placement within a framework that accommodates constructivist, sociocultural, 
poststructuralist and new literacy understandings of situated learning. This report 
discusses participant commentaries in terms of the ten most recurrent themes 
emerging from open-coded analyses of the data. The findings suggest that community 
placement has the capacity to provide significant experiences for students, and to 
impact on participants’ evolving identities as bi- or multiculturals. Community 
placements also provide opportunities for acquiring procedural, pragmatic and 
linguistic knowledge. The paper  concludes that community placements can serve as 
communities of practice for the majority of language and cultural learners.