Re-Writing the Goals of Foreign Language Teaching/Learning: The Achievement of Multiple Literacies and "Symbolic Competence"

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Foreign language pedagogical models are (yet again!) in a period of transition. For a few decades, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) reigned supreme among other models, as “communicative competence” was deemed the desired outcome of the language learning process. This is no longer the case. With globalization spreading, learners face increasing demands that go beyond being able to successfully navigate simple face-to-face interactions: They need to engage in critically interpreting all sort of texts, and, ultimately, they need to negotiate their identity in other languages. Accordingly, FL departments in higher education institutions have began rethinking the current models, have already come up with alternative organizing principles, and are slowly proposing alternative curricula. Multiple literacies and advanced foreign language capacities (Kern, 2000; Swaffar and Arens, 2005; Byrnes et al. (eds.), 2006 among others) have become such alternate models/ constructs. In this paper, I will analyze these frameworks: The ways in which they integrate and/or diverge from previous approaches, the likelihood that they ‘go mainstream’ and the outcomes for learners. I will then consider whether “symbolic competence,” a notion proposed by Kramsch (2008), can be thought of as the outcome of these new models.

Stream: Literacy, Language, Multiliteracies; Languages Education and Second Language Learning

Paper: Re-Writing the Goals of Foreign Language Teaching

I am an Assistant Professor of Spanish. I have a PhD in linguistics, from the U. of Santiagode Compostela, Spain. I work and have worked at Liberal Arts colleges in the United States. I work on Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, and Pragmatics. I am also interested in issues of Language Policy and Language Planning. I teach intermediate and advanced courses in Spanish, as well as a course on Methods, and the Politics of Spanish