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Kate Paesani is Director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) and Affiliate Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

If you define literacy as the ability to read and write, then you may find this article’s title perplexing. How does interpersonal speaking help foreign language students become better readers and writers? The answer involves thinking differently about the concept of literacy itself. Defining literacy broadly as the ability to interpret and create texts of various genres and modalities to communicate across a range of sociocultural contexts, facilitates connections to interpersonal speaking. Certainly, reading, writing, listening, and speaking do not take place in a vacuum; they are overlapping and complimentary. This multimodal view of language reflects authentic communication and is essential to building students’ language competencies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Moreover, communication takes place through more than written means; it entails interacting with written, audio, audiovisual, and visual information to convey messages through language. Spoken language is thus closely linked to one’s ability to communicate about textual content and to being literate in a language (Kern, 2015). Finally, interpersonal speaking reflects the literacy-based concepts of interpretation (i.e., understanding the cultural products, practices, and perspectives represented in texts) and creation (i.e., applying new understandings to produce language in creative ways). As such, interpersonal speaking involves creating oral texts and also interpreting texts of all types through interactive exchanges with others.

Rethinking interpersonal speaking in relation to literacy also means rethinking classroom practices. Contrary to traditional views, where interpersonal speaking includes engaging in controlled, teacher-led Q&A, using language in predictable patterns, expressing personal opinions, rehearsing scripted dialogues, and developing oral survival skills, a literacy perspective involves interpreting and creating authentic texts, using language to construct and negotiate meaning, working collaboratively to solve problems, and situating one’s viewpoint in relation to the world. To engage students in interpersonal speaking tasks centered around authentic texts, four instructional stages are essential: (1) pre-speaking to access background knowledge and provide linguistic support for speaking; (2) textual interpretation to gather information and explore form-meaning connections; (3) knowledge application to demonstrate textual understanding through speaking; and (4) summary and reflection to discuss knowledge gained and share learning experiences. Possible activity types for these stages include teaching gambits (i.e., formulaic expressions), jigsaw activities, debates, or think-pair-share (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2015, pp. 125-9). Regardless of the activities implemented, the goal is to engage students in interpersonal speaking tasks that encourage textual interpretation and creation, communication in a range of contexts, and, ultimately, foreign language literacy development.

References:

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). ‘Multiliteracies’: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies, 4(3), 164-194.

Kern, R. (2015). Language, literacy, and technology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Paesani, K., Allen, H. W., & Dupuy, B. (2016). A multiliteracies framework for collegiate foreign language teaching. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.