LITERATURE AS A VEHICLE FORDEVELOPING AND ASSESSING MULTIMODALCOMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND MEDIATION SKILLS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING
LITERATURE AS A VEHICLE FORDEVELOPING AND ASSESSING MULTIMODALCOMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND MEDIATION SKILLS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Summary/Abstract: The Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2020) has not only enriched our understanding of the essence of communicative competence, but also underlined the key role of developing mediation skills when teaching and learning a foreign language. The main implication of this new conceptual understanding for our work as language teachers involves adopting a more functional, action-oriented approach to the teaching of the target language which goes beyond the practice of the four skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing) for their own sake, zooming in on what learners can actually do with the acquired linguistic competence when they communicate in a variety of contexts, constructing and conveying meaning multimodally, through all channels of communication (verbal, visual, auditory, kinesthetic), i.e. the focus is now on the four modes of communication: reception, production, interaction and mediation. The present article briefly outlines the essence of multimodal communicative competence and goes on to illustrate the potential of using literary texts in the language classroom to develop learners’ multimodal literacy and mediation skills. A case study illustrating the rich affordance of literature as a linguodidactological resource is also presented.

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