Recent definitions of competences students should acquire in the EFL classroom include three receptive
skills – reading, listening, viewing – and three productive skills – speaking, writing and mediating
(Surkamp/Yearwood 2018; Kirchhoff 2018). Writing, one of the productive skills, plays a huge role in the
ELF classroom, as it is used by the students from the very first language session on to copy information.
The changing understanding of texts towards multiliteracy also has an effect on the writing
competence in the EFL classroom.
When students start to actually write for the purpose of communication, they are confronted with different
styles of texts already. From this point on, they might be able to differentiate between different contexts of
written texts and different text forms. For example, the typical task for using writing to communicate
would be writing a letter to another student living e.g. in Canada.
Multiliteracy is important in two ways here. Firstly, they might think about adding a picture of themselves
to their letter or discuss different layout styles. This would affect not only the linguistic mode but also the
visual and spatial mode (and therefore is multimodal). There could also be different ideas on which kind of
letters can be written: actual letters, emails or even just comments on social media? Sounds and movements
could also be relevant here, so even two more modes could be covered.
Secondly, they could face issues concerning dialects of English. Some vocabulary they have learned in the
EFL class might be uncommon in the part of the world they are writing to. Thus, they should be taught (the
awareness of) some regional differences which is besides multimodality another important part concerning
multiliteracies.
To conclude, writing, as a major skill in the ELF classroom, does include multiliteracies through different
types of texts, different contexts texts are written in, different dialects they are written in and the
multimodality of texts.
By Maike
References:
• Surkamp, C./Yearwood, T. (2018): Receptive Competences – Reading, Listening, Viewing. In: C.
Surkamp, B. Viebrock (Hrsg.): Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Stuttgart: Springer
Verlag.
• Kirchhoff, P. (2018): Productive Competences – Speaking, Writing, Mediating. In: C. Surkamp,
B. Viebrock (Hrsg.): Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Stuttgart: Springer Verlag.
