The notion of “community” holds a key to enhancing higher education experiences
for learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL), a core discipline of the
vocational education and training (VET) sector in New Zealand. This paper
contextualises the experiences of advanced EAL learners investing and participating
in assessed community placements. Community placements represent a pedagogical
intervention effectively giving learners access to communities of practice in a
meaningful, authentic, real-world context. Pedagogically, they create learning
contexts where instructors can reshape learners’ experiences by preparing students
to explore and experience the linguistic and cultural potential of community. In the
project, the journalised reflections of migrants and international students
participating in a degree in EAL in New Zealand reveal the linguistic, cultural and
ontological value of community work. The study uses the concepts of learner
investment, communities of practice and imagined communities to theorise the
participants’ learning, presents key qualitative findings about the cultural, linguistic,
and transformative capital of community placements, and suggests they are valuable
pedagogical interventions that can help reconfigure teaching and learning EAL in
VET contexts.