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ELT and the four communicative skills
Contemporary perspectives on the development, in more integrated and meaningful ways, of the four
skills: reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
Professor Erika Coachman
1. Itens iniciais
Propósito
As you read this Unit, you shall become familiar with English Language Teaching approaches to the four
communicative skills – namely, reading, listening, speaking, and writing. You will also get in touch with the
concept of multiliteracies proposed in the 1990s by the New London Group and find out contemporary views
on how linguistic competence can be more effectively enhanced with the help of more integrated means.
Preparation
Make sure you have an English dictionary at hand. If you prefer the screen to the page, you can rely on free
online options, such as the Cambridge and the Merriam-Webster dictionaries. If you want to enrich your
vocabulary and learn new expressions, try theThesaurus, a dictionary that lists antonyms and synonyms for
each word. Linguee is a tool that might also come in handy since it provides contextualized translations and
versions of the expressions you search.
Goals
To describe the notion of multiliteracies and the multimodality of contemporary communication.
To identify how reading and writing skills can be developed.
To analyze how speaking and listening skills can be enhanced.
Warm up
During the 1970s and 1980s, the new field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) went through significant
expansion, broadening its focus to include the learning of a second, third, or multiple additional languages. In a
twenty-first-century globalized world, where monolingualism tends to figure as an exception, English students
often bring to the classroom linguistic competences in more than one language.
According to Hall (2019), the expansion of the SLA realm owes to the remarkable transformations fueled by
the fast pace of ground-breaking processes, such as globalization, technologization, and mass migration. You
may consider as an example the transformative impact of digital technologies on SLA: new technological
resources – like tablets, video games, smartphones, and computers – have substantially changed the way we
communicate, blending audio, graphic, and pictorial stimuli in ways that challenge the traditional division of
language into four basic skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). 
The increased social, cultural, political, and ideological exchange across a wide range of diverse communities
has favored the emergence of more dynamic multilingual and multimodal forms of discursive interaction
among them – to which English Language teachers should not turn a blind eye.
As you go through the first section, you will become familiar with the notion of multiliteracies – a novel
approach proposed by scholars who formed the New London Group to come up with innovative strategies to
transform language learning into a more meaningful, integrated, and multimodal experience. As for the second
section, the objective is to examine pedagogical paths for the teaching of reading and writing, while the focus
of the third one is devoted to speaking and listening.
Even though this outline may give you the impression that linguistic skills are separate tools, as you move
forward, you shall realize that these four skills are inexorably intertwined and meaningfully learned when
tackled via integrated and multimodal strategies.
• 
• 
• 
1. Integrated and multimodal ELT
Reinventing ELT
In his seminal book Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Post-Method (2006) as well as in his
famous article Towards a Post-Method Pedagogy (2001), the applied linguist Kumaravadivelu discusses the
growing unease with the assumption that any particular method can be applied across a wide array of
different contexts, regardless of learners’ and teacher’s needs, motivations, and prior knowledge. Hinkel
(2006) adds to the discussion, by stating that there is now widespread skepticism towards such worldwide
applicability of methods and a renewed interest in how ELT can be molded in tune with local needs.
Similarly, traditional approaches towards the teaching of the four basic skills – namely, speaking, listening,
reading, and writing – have been challenged by the recognition that, in the age of globalization,
technologization and large-scale migration, new multimodal and context-driven pedagogies are in demand to
reinvent ELT (LOTHERINGTON, 2004). Although skill-based approaches are still commonly employed, they
ignore that, in real discursive interaction, these four abilities are not used separately, but simultaneously, as
Hinkel reminds us:
Commonly accepted perspectives on language teaching and learning recognize that, in meaningful
communication, people employ incremental language skills not in isolation, but in tandem. For example,
to engage in a conversation, one needs to be able to speak and comprehend at the same time. To make
learning as realistic as possible, integrated instruction has to address a range of L2 skills simultaneously,
all of which are requisite in communication.
(HINKEL, 2006, p.113)
There is no straightforward integrated approach to ELT and most decision-making should be up to the
teachers, who sensitive to their students’ needs and resources, ought to find the most suitable combinations
to teach the additional language in more integrated and meaningful ways. Reading can be taught in
conjunction with writing and vocabulary, for example, so that learners may identify how different textual
genres entail particular choices in terms of wording and structure. 
While detecting regular patterns in the texts they read, learners may pick up the style, vocabulary, and textual
organization that shall help them mold the contours of their own written productions. Likewise, listening
activities may provide important opportunities for the teaching of speaking-related skills, as students get in
touch with different pronunciations and cross-cultural exchanges. 
According to Hinkel (2006), integrated approaches to ELT may rely on different models of activities,
including theme based, task based, genre based, problem based, discourse based, project based,
literacy based, community based, competence based, and literature based, just to name a few. 
Integrating the development of the four basic skills is important, but it is not enough.
ELT in the 21st century must also attend to the challenges posed by the digital interfaces that mediate human
interaction. The fast-paced technologization of the world we inhabit has revamped not only the way people
communicate, but also the way they work, date, go shopping, pay bills, and make new friends. Despite these
revolutionary transformations, many ELT environments have remained immune to such changes and kept
untouched course syllabi in which the four skills are tackled separately, apart from the digital and multimodal
communicative situations in which actual discursive interactions are held.
In the paper entitled What Four Skills?, Heather Lotherington (2004) analyzes the pedagogical failure in
keeping up to date with the emerging digital communication, which has substantially altered language use due
to spatial restraints (imposed by small screens) and time limitations (enforced by synchronous chatting).
In addition, ELT has also tended to lag behind in including linguistic transformations brought about by
globalized digital exchanges, frequently dismissing neologisms, acronyms, spellings, abbreviations, textual
genres, and punctuation uses that have not been incorporated by tradition yet. Such focus on isolated
linguistic skills must be revisited so learners are not taught in artificial and arbitrary ways, as Lotherington
remarks:
New ways of communicating digitally invalidate the four-skills language analysis that has grounded
historical second-language teaching practice and require new ways of thinking about even such basics
in second language teaching and learning as spelling,grammar, and punctuation.
(LOTHERINGTON, 2004, p.66)
In face of the drastic transformations textual production has been submitted to, it has become even more
challenging to draw a rigid line between one given skill and another. Such blurred division makes it significantly
difficult to tell the difference between oral and written discourse, for example. Consider the elucidative
example Lotherington (2004, p. 65) provides to underline the prominent influence of orality on digital writing –
in addition to the increasing use of online language in other written productions:
hey mommy, here ya go. I will think up sum smiley faces that ppl use when they r describing emotions in
a couple o’ taps of the keyboard (when they r 2 lazy 2 describe their emotions 2 u). w/ this little
paragraph I hope u like these smileys!! n e ways here they r.
(LOTHERINGTON, 2004, p.65)
As the example illustrates, digital writing encompasses characteristics that make conventions for spoken and
written language overlap. Apart from artificial activities especially designed for coursebooks, everyday
language cannot be compartmentalized into four skills; after all, social interactions cannot be broken down
into fragments of discursive exchanges. Instead, they are best defined as complex communicative
engagements, situated linguistic practices, in which diverse abilities are braided together. 
Literacy and multiliteracies
To replace conventional and compartmentalized approaches to English Language Teaching (ELT), Lotherington
(2004, p.68) has proposed a new notion of literacy, defined as “a continually evolving processing facility”, a 
multimodal set of abilities that goes far beyond the mere assimilation of alphabetic scripts, as well as the
automatization of old-fashioned conventions for reading and writing “adequately” – or, in other words, in
accordance with hegemonic norms for language usage.
Such innovative views on ELT understand literacies as context-bound communicative abilities, as a
situated system of knowledge we need to make sense of the world around us. 
In 1994, in particular, the concept of literacy was significantly reshaped by the New London Group, a group of
scholars that gathered in New London, New Hampshire, in order to discuss new approaches to literacy
education.
The New London Group is composed of the following members: Courtney Cazden (USA), Bill Cope (Australia),
Norman Fairclough (UK), James Gee (United States), Mary Kalantzis (Australia), Gunther Kress (UK), Allan
Luke (Australia), Carmen Luke (Australia), Sarah Michaels (US), Martin Nakata (Australia). Their most
prominent result came two years later when “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” was
published in the journal Harvard Educational Review (CAZDEN et al., 1996). For members of the New London
Group, ELT should not remain unaffected by the profound changes in the communication channels brought
about by the new technologies, nor by the staggering cultural diversity of a globalized world.
The notion of multiliteracies is then brought forward by the New London Group in an attempt to respond to the
challenges imposed by this new scenario. Their aim is to draw attention to the centrality of cultural and
linguistic plurality in order to redesign approaches to ELT in ways to enable our language students to achieve
the main goals of literacy learning.
The Main Goals of Literacy Learning.
Understanding that pedagogy should be aimed at promoting learners’ equitable participation in society, the
New London Group (1996) has argued that literacy education should no longer be understood as the
mechanical absorption of standardized mainstream varieties. Nor should it be limited to learning how to read
and write in strictly formal, monolingual, and monocultural ways.
Rooted upon the assumption that the human mind – as well as human languages – are necessarily embodied
and situated within specific social and cultural contexts, they claim that literacy learning must encompass at
least two aspects of the discursive multiplicity available in an increasingly globalized world.
The two fundamental aspects of literacy learning (CAZDEN et al., 1996, p.61) are:
Cultural and linguistic diversity
Instead of being taught as an abstract set of
rules, language teaching should be context-
bound and account for the cultural and
linguistic diversity that have molded discursive
exchanges and social interactions at large.
Variety of text forms
Language teaching should be in tune with the
constant changes caused by the continuous
transformations in the field of information and
multimedia technologies.
Literacy learning: 4 components
To keep track of the two fundamental aspects, literacy learning should include four basic components: 
Situated practice.
Overt instruction.
Critical framing.
Transformed practice.
Instead of stages of a finite cycle, these four components may be experienced simultaneously or reviewed
time after time. To understand their purposes and contributions towards a diverse and multimodal approach to
literacy education, you should examine these four components of literacy learning (CAZDEN et al., 1996, p.88):
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
Situated practice
Immersion in experience and use of available discourses, including those from the students’ lifeworlds
and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces. The main purpose is
to draw upon the experience of meaning-making in different realms.
Overt instruction
The main purpose is to develop explicit metalanguages to describe, analyze and interpret the design
elements available in different modes of meaning.
Critical framing
The central aim is to invite learners to stand back from what they are studying to submit it to a critical
analysis taking into consideration the social context in which the text is produced and the purposes of
the meanings it conveys.
Transformed practice
The purpose is to help students become designers of their own social futures, providing opportunities
for them to review and apply what they have learned, operationalizing knowledge acquired during
overt instruction and critical framing in a reflexive manner.
In a nutshell, literacy education as a situated practice makes room for the contextualization of meaning-
making, treating language use as a communicative engagement embedded in a given social, cultural, and
political scenario. Overt instruction, in turn, must aim at the development of metalanguages; in other words,
explicit linguistic knowledge on how language is designed in ways to favor the construction of particular
meanings.
Such metalinguistic understanding helps learners approach texts in comprehensive and responsive ways,
submitting them to what the New London Group has called critical framing – that is, a critical analysis of
discourse that may take into account the social context in which the text was produced and the
communicative purpose it is meant to fulfill.
At last, literacy education must include transformed practice, an active exercise in which students
autonomously operationalize the understandings acquired during overt instruction and critical framing, finding
opportunities inside as well as outside the classroom to review and apply this set of linguistic and
metalinguistic knowledge in a reflexive way.
Design elements
By now you may have noticed how complex textual interpretation is. But how can students make sense of a
myriad of texts?
Developing metalanguages to describe and interpret different texts (whether spoken, visual, or written) should
enable learners to recognize a wide array of design elements and acknowledge their contributions to the
meaning-making process as a whole. These design elements can be grouped into five main categories
(CAZDEN et al., 1996, p.83):
Audio Design
Music and sound effects.
Spatial Design
Ecosystemic, geographic, and architectonic meanings.
Gestural Design
Behavior, bodily physicality, gesture, sensuality, feelings, effects, etc.
Visual DesignColors, perspective, vectors, foregrounding, and backgrounding.
Linguistic Design
Delivery, vocabulary and metaphor, modality, transitivity, normalization processes, information
structure, local coherence relations, and global coherence relations.
The concept of “design” developed by the New London Group is a deliberate attempt to raise students’
awareness to the complexity of textual interpretation.
Rather than merely decoding unequivocal meanings conveyed by the words of a given text, making
sense of what we read or hear involves a dynamic multifaceted process that should take into
account an infinite variety of designs crafted according to one’s culture, subculture, or individual
identity .
Therefore, embracing the notion of multiliteracies is to acknowledge the existence of multiple designs and
modalities and understand their importance to how we respond to texts. 
Atenção
Multiliteracies replace ELT traditional and exclusive focus on the written word, inviting us to look at the
text from different angles, examining how space, gestures, colors, backgrounds, and music, for instance,
may play a crucial role in the process of meaning-making. 
Serafini and Gee (2017) suggest:
The concept of multiliteracies was intended to challenge views of literacy as involving primarily written
language and as the mastery of a relatively stable and unitary set of rules and conventions for the use of
this language. The more complex view of meaning-making reflected in the NLG [New London Group]
definition of multiliteracies recognized the importance of multiple modalities in meaning-making as well
as the value and necessity of diversity in representations and meaning-making, whether that be
specialist forms of language used by scientists or the mixture of text, visual images, or video on a pop-
culture fan.
(SERAFINI; GEE, 2017, p. 3)
Integrated and multimodal ELT
In this video Professor Erika Coachman will talk about the challenges ELT faces in the 21st century. Stay tuned!
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ELT in the 21st century
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Multiliteracies
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Learning check
Questão 1
“UNESCO has been at the forefront of global literacy efforts since 1946, advancing the vision of a literate
world for all. It views acquiring and improving literacy skills throughout life as an intrinsic part of the right to
education. The “multiplier effect” of literacy empowers people, enables them to participate fully in society and
contributes to improve livelihoods. 
Literacy is also a driver for sustainable development in that it enables greater participation in the labour
market; improved child and family health and nutrition; reduces poverty and expands life opportunities.” 
(Retrieved from: UNESCO. Literacy. [unesco.org] 2021) 
The contemporary concept of “literacy” can be best defined as:
A
The ability to read and write successfully, a set of automated skills that allows the assimilation of alphabetic
scripts and linguistic conventions.
B
Mastery of the written language and the ability to decode texts meaningfully, in accordance with hegemonic
norms for language usage.
C
The mixture of linguistic, visual, gestural, audio, and spatial designs.
D
An abstract set of rules that guides meaning-making practices and facilitates the assimilation of alphabetic
scripts.
E
A multimodal set of abilities that goes beyond the automated assimilation of the written word.
A alternativa E está correta.
Replacing conventional approaches to ELT, a new notion of literacy has emerged as "a continually evolving
processing facility", a multimodal set of abilities that goes far beyond the mere assimilation of alphabetic
scripts and surpasses the automatization of old-fashioned conventions for reading and writing "adequately"
(LOTHERINGTON, 2004, p.68). Literacy is now understood from the context of an increasingly text-
mediated, digital, full of information, and fast-changing world.
Questão 2
Multiliteracies is a pedagogical approach developed in 1994 by a group of ten educators and researchers. The
notion of multiliteracies has been developed by the New London Group so as to:
A
advocate the definition of literacy as the mastery of a stable and unitary set of traditional skills that define
appropriate reading and writing practices.
B
acknowledge the existence of multiple designs and modalities and underline the centrality of one’s culture,
subculture, and identity to the construction of meaning.
C
compartmentalize ELT and promote the isolated teaching of the four basic skills, namely, reading, listening,
speaking, and writing.
D
raise students’ awareness to how reading consists of identifying only one correct meaning encrypted by the
written words of the text.
E
stabilize and describe a uniform set of rules to define what is appropriate and what is not when it comes to
academic reading and writing.
A alternativa B está correta.
The concept of multiliteracies replaces ELT's traditional and exclusive focus on the written word, inviting us
to look at the text from different angles, examining how space, gestures, colors, backgrounds, and music,
for instance, may play a crucial role in the process of meaning-making. In addition, it highlights how culture,
subculture, or individual identity play an important function in the construction of meaning, explaining to a
great extent why we use language the way we do.
2. Reading and writing
Reading: theoretical perspectives
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913) defined language
as an essential tool that mediates human relations, a collection of signs used whenever we transmit or
interpret messages. For Saussure, linguistic signs do not carry an intrinsic meaning: the ideas they represent
are arbitrarily defined and no logical connection is necessary to bind the signifier and the signified.
Relembrando
According to Ferdinand Saussure, signifier and signified make up the linguistic sign. But do you
remember what they are? Even though the sign is the smallest unit of communication, it is composed of
a material component (signifier) – image, words on a page, etc. – and a concept called signified. The
signifier thus is the physical counterpart which lacks meaning. The relationship between signified and
signifier is, in accordance with Saussure’s thoughts, arbitrary as there is no perceptible logical
connection between them. 
Hence, interpreting a message is like breaking a code: receivers decipher encrypted messages aided by prior
knowledge on the meanings arbitrarily assigned to each signifier. 
Saussure’s ideas were followed by other approaches to language that gradually brought the sender and the
receiver of the message into the picture, slowly undermining assumptions that human communication could be
seen as a predictable and mechanical process, in which stable and arbitrary meanings are mechanically
transmitted from one individual to another.
Many decades later, in the 1970s and in the 1980s, the concept of reading, in particular, was substantially
modified by studies on reader-response, which consistently rebuked the belief in the existence of one correct
interpretation to be grasped by a competent reader.
Saiba mais
For scholars like Iser (1978) and Ingarden (1973), reading is neither objective nor straightforward;
instead, it is an activity in which meaning is actively constructed by readers, whose role is not to seek
hidden truths in the text, but to build their own interpretations. 
When analyzed from this perspective, reading emerges as an essentially dialogical experience, in which
readers constantly negotiate meaning-making with texts by means of selecting and organizing information, as
well as predicting and reformulatingexpectations.
Reading is, thus, a process that demands readers’ active engagement, an experience that depends entirely on
the multiplicity of texts that form each individual (BARTHES, 1974) – a diversity that seems to explain why the
same text may often trigger different reactions and interpretations. After all, each reader’s social, affective,
and literary repertoires influence the way he or she responds to the form and to the content of the text
(MCRAE, 1998; ZYNGIER, 1994).
But reading is not entirely an individual process since it is also shaped to a certain degree by shared cultural
and educational grounds. The notion of interpretive communities (FISH, 1980) invites us to look at reading as
an activity that relies on the socialization of reading procedures.
Curiosidade
Stanley Fish’s theory was first based on a quite interesting experiment. In the chapter entitled "How to
Recognize a Poem When You See One," taken from his book Is There a Text In This Class?, Fish
describes and discusses the following experiment: Students from the State University of New York at
Buffalo were told that a list of names, which was actually an assignment for the previous class, was a
poem. These students were taking a course on seventeenth-century English and religious poetry and
used all their linguistic and theoretical repertoire to specify significances and work towards an
understanding of the so-called poem on the board. They tried to grasp larger structural patterns in the
poem so as to discern its central meaning. These students represent what Fish calls “interpretative
community” since they share a preconceived reading “recipe” that allows them to impart meaning/
relevance to certain formal and semantic aspects of texts. 
Readers from the same community often share the same “horizon of expectations”– that is, interpretive
possibilities available in a given historical period based on hegemonic and widespread values and beliefs.
Rooted upon this common ground, readers may often converge to the same conclusion, privileging certain
interpretations while ignoring others (JAUSS, 1982).
Based on these views, reading stems from social learning, as it depends on the internalization of rules, beliefs,
and customs treasured in specific communities. At the same time, reading also remains an individual process,
unavoidably molded by each reader’s unique experiences.
Reading skills in ELT
As you can see, knowing how to read is far from simplistic definitions: reading is more than just deciphering an
alphabet or putting the syllables of a word together. Being “literate”, therefore, covers a wide range of abilities
that go beyond the decrypting of words put together in a given sentence. But how can these reading skills be
taught in English classrooms?
According to Hinkel (2006), the most popular strategy for teaching reading skills has resorted to students’
existing knowledge to foster the development of their reading skills in a second language.
Even though this approach has been widely used since the 1980s, Hinkel (2006) also argues that exclusively
relying on learners’ prior reading experiences in their mother tongue is not enough to tackle reading skills in a
second language: they must also build basic linguistic knowledge so that they can navigate texts written in the
target language.
In other words, it is important to work on students’ reading abilities via bottom-up processing abilities, which
may include, for instance, learning how to recognize words based on their spelling as well as on the
morphemes that compose them.
Bottom-up processing
Starting from the lowest level of hierarchy or complexity towards the top. 
Atenção
To put it in a nutshell, reading skills in a first language may not automatically be applied to the
interpretation of texts in a second language. 
One of the first steps is to help students identify words based on their visual appearance, gradually
connecting sounds to letters. According to Hinkel (2006), developing word recognition fluency is a sine qua
non precondition for learners’ reading accomplishments. Thus, students’ reading skills are often compatible
with the abilities to process what is written, although reading should not be limited to deciphering words.
Many design elements – such as color, layout, and sound effects, especially in digital media – play a crucial
role in the construction of meaning. Interpreting a text, therefore, encompasses a wide range of skills, abilities
that should account not only for the linguistic design of the texts we read, but also for the audio, spatial,
gestural, and visual designs, increasingly in demand in the era of multimodal and technologized experiences
with communication. 
Saiba mais
Processing words and letters in a second language is a demanding cognitive exercise, especially if your
mother tongue’s orthography is significantly different from the target language. That is, if your L1 is
Chinese, Japanese, or Hebrew, for instance, developing reading skills in English may be more challenging
than it is for learners whose mother tongues share a similar orthography, like Spanish or Portuguese
(HINKEL, 2006). 
Have you heard of “extensive reading” or “sustained silent reading” before?
The objective is to expand students’ linguistic repertoire through the promotion of silent reading as an
enjoyable and prolonged exercise: “the more one reads, the larger his or her language base becomes”
(HINKEL, 2006, p.123). Such purpose is fulfilled once learners are exposed to large amounts of new and old
vocabulary, enhancing reading fluency at the same time novel words are learned and old ones are practiced.
Dica
However, extensive reading must be adequate, tackling only one unknown word for every fifty words of
the text (HINKEL, 2006). 
Writing skills in ELT
Writing has also been broadly impacted by the growing technologization of communication. In the chapter
“Digital Writing Matters”, Danielle Devoss (2018) claims that writing is a key skill for those who navigate
twenty-first-century communication.
Curiosidade
Indeed, although paper-based writing has become rather rare these days, digital writing activities such
as blogging, posting an update on social media, sharing a message on WhatsApp or Telegram, sending
an e-mail, or building a PowerPoint presentation, for example, are recurrent practices. For Devoss (2018),
it is clear that, in the United States, people have never written as much as they do these days. 
Nevertheless, writing should not be regarded as an ability learned without adequate training. Moreover,
success in developing robust writing skills may be used to promote learners’ social leverage and provide them
with the necessary means to participate in privileged social, political, and cultural arenas. Lack of instruction in
writing, conversely, often undermines students’ equitable access to a wide range of academic and
professional careers (HINKEL, 2006).
When it comes to teaching writing to additional language learners, specifically, it is important to acknowledge 
the cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences between their L1 and L2.
It is also essential to include grammar and vocabulary teaching as important components of writing
instruction so that students can communicate their ideas meaningfully.
For those aiming at the development of academic writing skills, it is also crucial to integrate the learning of
grammar and vocabulary into the construction of suitable rhetorical and linguistic writing choices – a complex
set of skills known as “academic literacy”.
Yet, teaching writing to young learners should, in the beginning, focus on the achievement of basic skills, such
as letter and word recognition so that, later on, students can carry on, and develop the necessary linguistic
abilities to handle morphemes, phrases, and sentences with more autonomy and creativity.
In addition, successful writers should be able to tackle genre-based tasks, shaping their writing choices in
light of the chosen textualgenre, understanding that personal narratives, for example, differ significantly from
academic prose, which is also remarkably distinct from professional e-mail writing. 
Blending reading and writing instruction may prove a worthwhile alternative as it provides learners
with the opportunity to identify the diverse characteristics of textual genres, recognizing that
different types of texts may call for distinct vocabulary, grammar, and rhetorical constructions. 
Therefore, textual analysis allied to genre-based instruction are authentic and meaningful means to teach
writing skills in a more vivid and contextualized manner, helping learners attend to – or, alternatively,
deliberately subvert – the socio-cultural norms that have traditionally set different literary, academic, or
professional genres apart.
Published by the Harvard Educational Review, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores’ article (2015) “Undoing
Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education” shows that academic
linguistic practices are not politically neutral, since they are often used to stigmatize non-white learners. In the
paper, Rosa and Flores argue that English learners viewed as long-term students often engage in academic
linguistic practices classified as “deficient” no matter how close they actually get to fulfilling the academic
norms of appropriateness.
Teaching reading and writing
In this video Professor Erika Coachman will bring about a discussion on the teaching of reading and writing. 
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The most important topics of this section are revised in the following videos.
Developing reading skills
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Developing writing skills
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Learning check
Questão 1
Knowing how to read goes beyond simplistic definitions. Regarding reading skills, it is correct to affirm that:
A
Extensive reading is exclusively aimed at improving reading fluency.
B
Reading skills in L1 are automatically transferred to L2 learning.
C
Reading can be defined as the decrypting of words placed side by side within a sentence.
D
Reading includes a variety of skills and does not account exclusively for linguistic design.
E
In the era of technologized communication, paper-based reading should be at the heart of L2 students’
experiences.
A alternativa D está correta.
Interpreting a text encompasses a wide range of skills, abilities that should account not only for the
linguistic design of the texts we read but also for the audio, spatial, gestural, and visual designs,
increasingly in demand in the era of multimodal and technologized experiences with communication.
Questão 2
Writing has, as well as reading, been impacted by the increasing technologization of communication,
becoming, consequently an essential skill. Choose the correct alternative regarding writing instruction:
A
Genre-based tasks are not useful strategies because L2 learners need to concentrate their efforts on the
acquisition of grammar and vocabulary.
B
Learners’ prior writing experiences do not help them improve their writing skills in a second language at all.
C
Textual analysis allied with genre-based instruction are authentic and meaningful means to teach writing skills
in a more vivid and contextualized manner.
D
Teaching writing to young learners should focus on complex syntactic knowledge from the beginning so that
they can learn how to organize their sentences meaningfully.
E
Academic writing instruction should focus exclusively on the development of adequate rhetorical techniques.
A alternativa C está correta.
Successful writers should be able to tackle genre-based tasks, shaping their writing choices in light of the
chosen textual genre, understanding that personal narratives, for examples, differ significantly from
academic prose, which is also remarkably distinct from professional e-mail writing.
3. Speaking and listening
Mental processes in spoken discourse
Even though speaking is one of the fundamental skills used for everyday communication, the first
comprehensive representation of this human faculty was only brought forward in the late 20th century, by
Willem Levelt (1938-). However, this remarkable model for the processing of speaking has one severe
limitation: most of the world population comes from bilingual backgrounds, yet Levelt’s framework is grounded
upon a monolingual approach to speaking. Still, according to Kees De Bot and Szilvia Bátyi (2022), it is also
possible to borrow some ideas from this model to think about implications for bilingual and multilingual
speaking skills.
The basis for Levelt’s approach relies on two key components:
A knowledge component A processing component
The first component accounts for speakers’ lexical, situational, discursive, morphological, and encyclopedic
knowledge – previous information they may lean on to translate thoughts into words. In turn, the latter
component includes three basic mental mechanisms that work together to generate speech: 1) the
conceptualizer; 2) the formulator; and 3) the articulator. While the conceptualizer requires the speakers’
attention, the other two operate in a very automatic manner.
Their cooperative functioning is illustrated below:
1. Conceptualizer
Message generation.
Monitoring.
 
2. Formulator
Grammatical encoding.
Surface structure.
Phonological and phonetic encoding.
 
3. Articulator
 
4. Audition
 
5. Speech Comprehesion System
The communicative process is initiated at the conceptualizer (1), which essentially expresses speakers’
communicative purposes aided by their prior lexical knowledge – a mental process that should take into
consideration the social setting where the interaction takes place so that an adequate linguistic register is
chosen. At this point, silence or pauses may signal not only the speakers’ hesitation but also the intensity of
the mental activity underlying the discursive interaction.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
Long pauses are indicative that speakers have devoted a great deal of attention to planning how to
express their ideas at the time of speaking. 
At this stage, two main objectives tend to keep speakers busy: their first concern is linearization, that is, how
to express ideas in a more linear, logical, or chronological order. The second concern is instrumentality, which
aims at molding the message accordingly so that the speakers’ communicative purpose is achieved. At the
conceptualizer level, speakers also monitor their own speech planning to make sure that the preverbal sketch
suits the goals of their discursive interaction and key lexical concepts are tied to the preverbal message before
it is handed over to the formulator (DE BOT; BÁTYI, 2022) 
At the following stage, the objective of the formulator is to transform those key lexical notions into a surface
structure. It is a complex (but automatic) mental operation in which the message takes shape with lexical
concepts transformed into syntactic, morphological, and phonological structures. According to De Bot and
Bátyi (2022), when a proficient speaker activates the verb “catch”, for example, this word choice calls for the
production of a direct object (e.g. “ball”) or/ and an indirect object (e.g. “for you”).
By the time the surface structure is complete, the preverbal message generated by the conceptualizer has
been transformed into sounds and word parts by the formulator, which basically handles the wording and the
syntactic organization of this mental process. The final result is passed on to the articulator, which finally 
transforms the encoded message into speech.
Speaking in ELT
Based upon Levelt’s description of the mental processes underlying our spoken discourse, it is easy to infer
that learning how to speak a second language is a multifaceted task which calls for the engagement of a
complex set ofsubskills. At the time of speaking, L2 learners must simultaneously make decisions regarding
content, word choice, morphosyntax, prosody, the appropriate linguistic register, the order in which
information shall be presented, among many others.
Speaking and underlying decision-making
In addition to making the choices, speakers must self-monitor so they can identify problems and make all the
due corrections over the course of the interaction itself. And whether or not the communicative purposes are
fulfilled depends on everyone involved in the social interaction.
Because of the rapid changes promoted by globalization as well as by the internationalization of English,
seeking successful communication is a burden that does not fall exclusively on the shoulders of those
conventionally seen as “non-native speakers”. This new perspective has broadly impacted ELT, including the
teaching of pronunciation.
The goal is no longer to mimic the hegemonic accents of the so-called “native speakers”, but to
promote intelligibility among all the participants of any given social interaction – a goal that has been
in tune with the demands of a globalized world where the English language is largely used to bridge
cross-cultural interactions between people with diverse mother tongues. 
Rooted upon these contemporary understanding on L2 acquisition, ELT should target at overall intelligibility
rather than on accent reduction. Therefore, as Hinkel (2022) recommends, second language instruction should
focus on prosodic features (such as rhythm and intonation), word stress, the length as well as the timing of
pauses, and the clarity of specific segments. As for the teaching of pronunciation, ELT should follow three
major criteria (HINKEL, 2006):
Pronunciation and intonation must be taught in context and in conjunction with speaking skills.
 
Instruction in pronunciation should serve broader communicative purposes, instead of merely
reproducing accents from so-called "native" speakers. 
 
Teaching of pronunciation and intonation should be based on realistic rather than on idealistic language
models.
In addition to abandoning the “native” speaker ideal, contemporary ELT has come up with new approaches to
the teaching of speaking abilities. As a response to the internationalization of English, speaking instruction
ought to concentrate on developing learners’ sociocultural skills, underscoring the importance of negotiating
meanings cross-culturally.
Current research in the field of ELT and Applied Linguistics, specifically, has tackled the centrality of gender,
power relations, social status, among other forces to the meaning-making processes within discursive
interactions. Analyzed from this perspective, speaking instruction should not deal with abstract linguistic
knowledge; instead, it should teach socially-situated communicative strategies, forms of address and speech
acts, such as requests, compliments, refusals, or clarification questions.
When comparing “turn the radio down” to “could you please turn the radio down”, Hinkel (2006) claims that
these apparently equivalent requests can be rendered as either appropriate or inappropriate depending on the
social context where they are used:
Noticing and analyzing divergent linguistic features frequently encountered in conversations or university
lectures are useful in teaching both speaking and listening for interactional, academic, or vocational
purposes (…). In fact, curricula that attend to the distinctions between conversational and formal oral
production can prepare learners for real-life communication (…).
(HINKEL, 2006, p.117)
1. 
2. 
3. 
Speaking activities to foster sociocultural skills
But what sort of speaking activities can in fact promote the development of such sociocultural skills? In the
1990s, research often indicated that speaking fluency was more readily attainable if the learner was exposed
to meaningful communicative interactions. Nonetheless, for those from instructed contexts, immersion in the
second language may not be available and ELT may resort to varied techniques to promote language learning
in the classroom. 
Exemplo
For Hinkel (2006), task-based activities make room for meaningful communicative interaction. Teachers
may, for example, invite students to engage in debates or problem-solving situations in which grammar is
learned, vocabulary is expanded, and fluency is enhanced. 
Speaking tasks in ELT can also give learners a chance to cope with more time-consuming cognitive demands,
resorting to oral (or even written) rehearsals to gain fluency and put the grammar and vocabulary learned into
use. Depending on the context selected and on the social norms chosen for the oral task, students may have
the chance to test specific syntactic, register, or lexical choices, evaluating whether or not these choices are
in tune with the social situation described in the exercise.
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For the British linguist David Crystal (2007), the technologization of the means of communication has
brought about a new mode for human interaction: the term “Netspeak” has been coined to set apart the
novel form of digital communication from traditional paper-based ways of discursive interaction. For
Crystal, Netspeak cannot be limited to spoken nor to written language and its innovative and fast-paced
changes make it virtually impossible to standardize the features or establish rigid norms for digital
language usage. Moreover, diverse factors may influence the contours of Netspeak, such as the type of
interface and hardware in use, the relationship between the interlocutors, and the communicative
purpose of the online interaction. 
Listening skills in ELT
The teaching of listening skills has also undergone profound changes over the past decades. In the 1970s, for
example, the scope of listening instruction was the development of bottom-up linguistic processing, inviting
students to detect words, contractions, limits between sentences, individual sounds, and combinations of
sounds.
Then, ten years later, the focus of the teaching of listening was shifted towards the construction of top-down
skills, activating students’ prior linguistic and cultural knowledge, reaching out for their repertoire of previous
communicative experiences.
Top-down skills
From the highest levels or most general ideas to the lowest or a particular level. The opposite of bottom-
up.
However, according to Hinkel (2006, p.117), neither spotlighting bottom-up skills nor relying on top-down
abilities have proven successful on the classroom floor: “learners who rely on linguistic processing often fail to
activate a higher order L2 schemata and those who correctly apply schema-based knowledge tend to neglect
the linguistic input”.
Therefore, more contemporary approaches to listening pedagogy have currently tried to blend top-
down and bottom-up skills, integrating the teaching of grammar and vocabulary with the
construction of broader communicative strategies rooted in each learner’s prior experiences
(HINKEL, 2006).
For Hinkel (2006), many different strategies can be used to enhance students’ listening skills, such as these 
five pedagogical initiatives (HINKEL, 2006, p.118):
Prelistening.
Making predictions.
Listening for gist or for the main idea.
Listening intensively.
Making inferences.
According to Hinkel (2006), pre-listening activities are useful opportunities to activate learners’ cultural
background knowledge, in addition to raising their awareness on how varied cultures, communities, and
individuals structure their speech to cater for their communicative purposes. Besides, listening activities can
expand students’ sociocultural repertoire, offering samples of how different social and cultural norms favor
specific registers (formal or informal), linguistic structures (e.g. passive or active), and discursive strategies. 
Moreover, integrated approaches to ELT may also resort to listening exercises as a convenient opportunity to
shed light on how interlocutorsmake lexical, morphosyntactic, prosodic, and phonological choices in
accordance with a specific social and/ or cultural context.
Listening activities may turn out to be a relevant alternative for the development of abilities in a more
realistic and purposeful manner.
That is precisely the case of listen-and-do tasks, which can be used for beginners and intermediate students
as long as contents are controlled so that targeted syntactic and lexical items are present in the activities,
aiding in the construction of linguistic knowledge as well as the assimilation of more pragmatic skills.
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
At last, academic listening has been traditionally used so that L2 learners can focus on the specific topics,
wording, register, and textual organization, in addition to the targeted lexical and grammatical contents. 
Teaching speaking and listening skills
In this video Professor Erika Coachman will discuss how listening and speaking skills can be enhanced. A
must-see video!
Conteúdo interativo
Acesse a versão digital para assistir ao vídeo.
Follow the thread
The most important topics of this section are revised in the following videos.
Speaking in ELT
Conteúdo interativo
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Developing listening skills
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Learning check
Questão 1
Speaking is a vital component of everyday life. Even though most of its mental processing is quite independent
and automatic, at least five decisions must be made during our speeches. Choose the option in which three of
them are listed.
A
Pre-listening, content, and word order.
B
Prosody, content, and predictions.
C
Content, word order, and morphosyntax.
D
Visual, audio, and gestural designs.
E
Conceptualizer, formulator, and articulator.
A alternativa C está correta.
At the time of speaking, L2 learners must make decisions regarding content, word choice, morphosyntax,
prosody, linguistic register, and the order in which information shall be presented, for example.
Questão 2
“In Speaking, Willem "Pim" Levelt, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, accomplishes the
formidable task of covering the entire process of speech production, from constraints on conversational
appropriateness to articulation and self-monitoring of speech. Speaking is unique in its balanced coverage of
all major aspects of the production of speech, in the completeness of its treatment of the entire speech
process, and in its strategy of exemplifying rather than formalizing theoretical issues.” 
(Retrieved from: LEVELT, W. J. M. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. The MIT Press. 1993). 
When it comes to speaking, it is correct to affirm that:
A
Pronunciation and intonation should be taught separately.
B
Speaking instruction aims at teaching students to reproduce native-like accents.
C
The conceptualizer transforms key lexical concepts into a surface structure.
D
The formulator transforms key lexical concepts into a surface structure.
E
The articulator is responsible for making sure ideas are ordered in a logical way.
A alternativa D está correta.
The objective of the formulator is to transform those key lexical notions into a surface structure. It is a
complex (but automatic) mental operation in which the message takes shape with lexical concepts
transformed into syntactic, morphological, and phonological structures.
4. Conclusão
Considerações finais
In this Unit, you have learned that being literate takes a lot more than the mere decoding of words. For the
New London Group, the notion of multiliteracies relies on the recognition that linguistic skills are not employed
in isolation and that spoken or written words are not the only elements we respond to while interpreting a text.
For these scholars, language usage must be acknowledged – and taught – as a situated practice, in which
individual beliefs, social norms, power relations, and identities are blended together.
Besides, in a globalized world, where the fast pace of technological advances constantly reshapes the
dynamics of communication, it is crucial to recognize that human interactions have become increasingly 
multimodal discursive engagements in which meaning negotiation is under the influence of audio, spatial,
gestural, visual, and linguistic designs.
Moreover, you have learned different approaches you can resort to in order to account for the teaching of the
so-called four basic skills, preferably in more realistic and contextualized ways that underscore their
integration.
Podcast
Professor Erika Coachman will revisit the main topics of the Unit.
Conteúdo interativo
Acesse a versão digital para ouvir o áudio.
Explore +
English has become an international language. The increasing level of internationalization of this language has
produced the expression “Global Englishes” and contested the employment of the term “native” to refer to
those who acquired English as a first language before the age of four.
 
In his book Translingual Practice: Global English and Cosmopolitan Relations, Suresh Canagarajah proposes
the concept of “translingualism” to challenge the idea that languages are pure and isolated systems,
independent and separate from each other. Give this provocative book a read!
Referências
BARTHES, R. The death of the author. In: BARTHES, R. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill, 1977. pp.142-148.
 
CAZDEN et al. (THE NEW LONDON GROUP). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard
Educational Review. 1996, pp.60-92.
 
CRYSTAL, D. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
 
DE BOT, K.; BÁTYI, S. Bilingual Models of Speaking. In: DERWING, T.; MUNRO, M.; THOMPSON, R. The
Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Speaking. Routledge: New York, 2022.
 
DeVOSS, D. Digital Writing Matters. In: ALEXANDER, J.; RHODES, J. The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing
and Rhetoric. Routledge: New York, 2018.
 
FISH, S. Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1980.
 
FLORES, N.; ROSA, J. Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in
Education. Harvard Educational Review. 2015.
 
HALL, J. K. Essentials of SLA for L2 Teachers: A Transdisciplinary Framework. Routledge: New York, 2019.
 
HINKEL, E. Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills. TESOL Quarterly, 40, 2006, pp. 109-131.
 
INGARDEN, R. The cognition of the literary work of art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
 
ISER, W. The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
 
JAUSS, H. R. Aesthetic experience and literary hermeneutics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982.
 
KUMARAVADIVELU, B. Towards a Post-Method Pedagogy. Tesol Quarterly, v. 35, n. 4, 2001.
 
KUMARAVADIVELU, B. Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Post-Method. Routledge, 2006.
 
LOTHERINGTON, H. What Four Skills? Redefining Language and Literacy Standards for ELT in the Digital Era. 
TESL Canada Journal. v.22, n.1, 2004, pp. 64-78.
 
MCRAE, J. The Language of Poetry. London: Routledge, 1998.
 
SERAFINI, F.; GEE, E. Introduction. In: SERAFINI, F.; GEE, E. (Eds) Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice
from New London to New Times. Teachers College Press, 2017.
 
ZYNGIER, S. At the Crossroads of Language and Literature: Literary Awareness, Stylistics, and the Acquisition
of Literary Skills in a EFLit Context. Tese de Doutorado. University of Birmingham (England), 1994.
	ELT and the four communicative skills
	1. Itens iniciais
	Propósito
	Preparation
	Goals
	Warm up
	1. Integrated and multimodal ELT
	Reinventing ELT
	Literacy and multiliteracies
	Cultural and linguistic diversity
	Variety of text forms
	Literacy learning: 4 components
	Situated practice
	Overt instruction
	Criticalframing
	Transformed practice
	Design elements
	Audio Design
	Spatial Design
	Gestural Design
	Visual Design
	Linguistic Design
	Atenção
	Integrated and multimodal ELT
	Conteúdo interativo
	Follow the thread
	ELT in the 21st century
	Conteúdo interativo
	Multiliteracies
	Conteúdo interativo
	Learning check
	2. Reading and writing
	Reading: theoretical perspectives
	Relembrando
	Saiba mais
	Curiosidade
	Reading skills in ELT
	Atenção
	Saiba mais
	Dica
	Writing skills in ELT
	Curiosidade
	Teaching reading and writing
	Conteúdo interativo
	Follow the thread
	Developing reading skills
	Conteúdo interativo
	Developing writing skills
	Conteúdo interativo
	Learning check
	3. Speaking and listening
	Mental processes in spoken discourse
	A knowledge component
	A processing component
	Speaking in ELT
	Speaking activities to foster sociocultural skills
	Exemplo
	Saiba mais
	Listening skills in ELT
	Teaching speaking and listening skills
	Conteúdo interativo
	Follow the thread
	Speaking in ELT
	Conteúdo interativo
	Developing listening skills
	Conteúdo interativo
	Learning check
	4. Conclusão
	Considerações finais
	Podcast
	Conteúdo interativo
	Explore +
	Referências