Making Multiliteracies Real: Comparing Multiliteracies Pedagogy & Communicative Language Teaching
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Your Questions Answered
Graphic of a visual representation of multiliteracies pedagogy.
- How does Multiliteracies Pedagogy compare to Communicative Language Teaching?
- How are these approaches similar? How do they differ?
- How are they applied to K-16 language education in the United States?
Origins and Purpose
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
1970s: Developed to address the need to communicate appropriately in real-world contexts. Grounded in social, functional, and cognitive orientations to language.
1980s-1990s: CLT grows and adapts based on new understandings of language teaching and learning. Strong and weak versions develop, as do offshoots such as Task-Based Language Teaching.
Multiliteracies Pedagogy (ML)
1990s: Developed in response to new views of literacy, texts, and communication, and increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Grounded in sociocultural principles and critical pedagogy.
2000s & beyond: ML grows and adapts based on new understandings of literacy practices and technology-enhanced communication. Applied to multiple disciplines, including K-16 language education.
Foundational Concepts
The aim of CLT is to develop students' communicative competence, whereas the aim of ML is to develop students' foreign language literacies. Related concepts help realize these aims.
CLT
ML
Communicative Competence
- ability to use language for a variety of purposes
- requires knowledge of language, social norms, ways to connect ideas, and strategies
Foreign Language Literacies
- ability to interpret and create texts of various genres and modalities (e.g., interviews, literature, infographics, films) that represent diverse societies
Interaction
- communication to exchange information and practice language forms
- often transactional and self-referential
Collaboration
- communication about textual & cultural content
- problem solving with others to uncover a text's forms and meanings
Comprehension
- literal understandings and factual details
- often surface level
Interpretation
- understanding texts as cultural products
- reading, listening or viewing "between the lines"
Form - Function Mappings
- language used to carry out real-world tasks (give directions, narrate, purchase tickets)
Form - Meaning Connections
- connecting language forms and conventions to the meaning they convey in texts
Focus on Meaning
Both approaches place meaningful communication at the center of instruction in different ways
CLT
- Communicating appropriately with others
- Functional, transactional language use
- Texts used to practice language forms and functions
ML
- Interpretation and creation of written, oral, and visual discourses
- Connecting language patterns to textual meaning
- Texts at the center of the curriculum
Teaching Principles
Both approaches enact a focus on meaning through different curricular and instructional priorities.
CLT
- Curriculum: language functions and related forms; cultural information
- Instruction: presentation of input, practice of language forms, production of output; activities to develop interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational communication about cultural information using specific language functions
ML
- Curriculum: texts and their language forms, conventions, and cultural content; how meaning is constructed
- Instruction: experiencing known and new information, conceptualizing form-meaning connections, analyzing ideas, applying knowledge; interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational communication about cultural content through texts
References:
- Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2015). The things you do to know: An introduction to the pedagogy of multiliteracies. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Learning by design (pp. 1-36). Palgrave Macmillan.
- Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2014). Approaches and methods in language teaching (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
This work was developed by the Center for Advanced Research
on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of
Minnesota and is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.
