Making EFL learning real and relevant to students' lives

I found this quote in an journal about Service Learning Studies published at ICU.

"Learning is more fruitful and dramatic when it is contextualized, when it is shown to have relevance to real life, and when it makes a difference in the lives of students and those they serve."

This leads to two questions.

First, in foreign language learning focusing on academic skills, how can we contextualize and make the learning relevant to real life?

For one, we need to show more video or other representations of real academic or professional situations in which effective (or ineffective) written and oral communication is being used. Assignments in classes should be linked to authentic activities and that link should be persuasively shown to students. Hopefully the examples and the tasks can be "cool"--something that inspires and creates excitement and makes students want to engage in.

Second, how do we make activities that can make a difference in the lives of students? The service learning system at ICU is an excellent example. Helping others can often lead to a higher awareness of the need for more learning, for a reexamination of self, one's cultures, and other cultures, and a critical inquiry into the dynamics that shape the world around us.

For language classes, will it make sense to design activities to try to make a difference somehow? Students can always do research on paper etc. with a specific local or global issue in mind, but that does NOT make any connection to real people. How can writing or speaking by about a real need? Interviews...emails...newletters...vodcasts...letter to the editor...presentations to persuade someone to do something...Specific ideas might be

• something to help refugees or other foreigners in Japan, something to an embassy in Japan
  
• something on an issue in an English speaking country that relates to Japanese students (overseas study, visas?, international relationships, depictions of Japanese culture...an letter to the editor or a letter to a policy institution about some cause?).
• something about their own university/community/life/culture - to introduce it in English to students of other countries
• Hmm...in any case, I want to get away from "Write an essay about education" (for me) That's not bad, and motivated students can use tasks like that to improve, but it is not engaging, inspiring, authentic.