Issues in Education The Importance of Context in learning By Ali BEKOU In Education, the context is just as substantial as the content itself in the classroom simply because one cannot predict or judge the success of a learning activity in isolation of the context where that particular activity takes places. In fact, the context plays an important role in shaping whatever activity that is conducted for teaching and learning purposes. Thereby, teachers are supposed to be more meticulous about understanding that context in order to create a learning environment in which every learner can strive. By virtue, the importance of context in generating motivation, maintaining long-term retention, associating learning with the real world around, and helping teachers understanding their learners has been asserted by a number of theorists and researchers. Most of these theorists who advocate this claim have constructivist inclinations. Providing an immediate learning context for learners helps them create meaningful tokens in their minds; the fact that keeps those learners highly motivated and stay on track. Indeed, meaningful context generates motivation which is a key factor in a learning situation. According to Gardner, “motivation involves a desire to attain the goal and favourable attitudes towards the activity in question” (Gardener, 1985: 50).Thus, providing a good context helps raising the students’ interest in the subject or the lesson in question. Again, in our present time, the context that is ICT-based motivates the students and enhances more learning chances because most of the students are digital natives. Needless to say that digital media tend to bring about new dimensions of context in which learners explore their full potential. Hence, It is of great importance to establish the nature of this digitally enhanced context and its importance for learning. Beside generating and boosting motivation, a good context helps students associate what they learn with the real world around. In turn, this enhances more retention of the information which is best explained and taught in a convenient setting and in a responding circumstance. Again, teaching which occurs independently of a certain context rarely meets the desired outcomes expected by the teacher. So, setting the scene and formulating knowledge in a given context that is not ambiguous is of great significance to the success of the learning process. By doing so, students make smooth connections by activating their schemata and thereby retrieve information for future purposes once they face similar context in real situations. On these grounds, contextual learning can’t take place in a vacuum, but should somehow be connected with real world attributes to make sense to learners (Johnson, 2002). In the same token, Dewey (1938) stresses the importance of having authentic experiences in his theory of experiential learning. In that, he recommends that learning should be contextualized and tuned to real-life situations. This reflects the cautious mingling of theory and practice, of content and context, of thinking and action. Thus, embedding contextualized learning content within inquiry and problem solving process is highly substantial to the success of learning (Innes, 2004). Building on the tenets of constructivism, teachers use materials with which learners become actively involved through manipulation or social interaction. Thereby, students take a