Teaching communication strategies for the workplace: a multimodal framework

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Hartle ◽  
Roberta Facchinetti ◽  
Valeria Franceschi

Abstract Recent changes in Higher Education (HE) approaches to content delivery, coupled with breakthroughs in the Information and Communications Technology field, have led to a whole new multimodal approach to teaching (Jewitt, C. 2009). In: Jewitt, C. (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. Routledge, London & New York; Jewitt, C. (2013). Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies. In: Jewitt, C. and Brown, B. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital technology research. Sage, London, pp. 250–265; Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse. Bloomsbury Academic, London). Multimodality in language teaching increasingly draws on multiple channels of communication and not simply text on a page. Multimodal awareness and competence are also paramount in intercultural and interpersonal communication, which has become increasingly common in today’s global workplace. Through the description of the activities implemented in the English for Professional Purposes (EPP) course entitled English for the World of Work, held at the University of Verona, we will illustrate our multimodal, EPP framework based on Littlewood’s learning continuum, which ranges from analytical study to experiential practice (2014). Our principal aim, however, is to highlight ways in which the didactic framework fosters an awareness of and competence in key areas such as multimodal competence and intercultural awareness as skills required for effective communication in today’s world of work.

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Grogan

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.


This article is devoted to the features and benefits of a professionally-oriented approach to teaching a foreign language in non-linguistic high schools on the example of engineering education. According to the latest standards of higher education (FSES 3++), students must have sufficient knowledge of a foreign language for business communication in oral and written forms. However, teachers of high schools face a number of difficulties in the formation of a foreign language communicative competence offuture engineers, namely: a constant decrease of a number offoreign language practical classes in a curriculum of a high school and a weak motivation of students. In our opinion, a professionally-oriented approach to teaching helps to solve these problems and make the process of learning a foreign language more intensive, focused and effective. That is, now, the development of strategies, methodological models and tools for teaching English, with a focus on professional communication, is an actual task for an English teacher at the University. This article presents some methods and techniques that stimulate students of engineering faculty to professionally oriented communication in English. Much attention is paid to both active teaching methods used during practical English classes, and individual work, which allows students to get more useful information and skills within the practical classes given, and also allows students to develop the need for individual knowledge acquisition and comprehension, thereby providing the increased interest of communication in a foreign language and increasing motivation to learn a foreign language.


Author(s):  
Hoang Van Nguyen

AbstractThe discourses of risk serve to organise the ways in which we understand and respond to potential harms and threats, which have become a major concern in our daily life. However, the discourses of risk have not been extensively investigated using linguistic text-based methods on the multimodal level, nor deeply examined beyond Western contexts. Grounded in the literature of risk and multimodal discourse, the aim of the study is to demonstrate Multimodal Discourse Analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective as a potential methodology to investigate how risk discourses are constructed in and through semiotic resources in a non-Western setting. Through a case study of child helmet awareness advertisements in Vietnam, the multimodal analysis reveals a comprehensive picture of risk discourses constructed across various semiotic modes. In this analysis, the discourses of risk are constructed through a negotiation of expert knowledge and traditional values to encourage the audience to take actions and provide helmets for their children. Findings of the study demonstrate the use of Systemic Functional multimodal approach to media and communication to provide evidence for risk discourses in the Vietnamese setting, which are at odds with the current literature and can potentially be extended to other contexts.


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