Sociocultural theory, especially the concepts of Community of Practice (CoP) can give us meaningful implication for active learning in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. This paper discussed the necessity of designing a new CoP model for the EFL classroom in Japan. First, the construct of the ZPD can be best utilized in the EFL classroom with the concept of cognitive apprenticeship, one of the features of the CoP perspective. Since it is the CoP perspective that helps operationalize the ZPD idea in the EFL classroom, the attempt to apply the CoP perspective to the EFL classroom is necessary and meaningful. Second, by comparing the CoP perspective used by the past L2 research for the ESL environments with the original CoP model, this paper showed the limitations of the past L2 research. The EFL classroom should be interpreted as the community which can be transformative. Members of the community build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. In order to cultivate the CoP and to create the cognitive apprenticeship environment in the EFL classroom, two sets of checklists which have been modified from the literature are presented in this paper.
