Developing Mediation Skills by Teaching English through Literature

Abstract

The Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2020) has not only enriched our understanding of the essence of communicative competence, but also underlined the key role of developing mediation skills when teaching and learning a foreign language. The main implication of this new conceptual understanding for our work as language teachers involves adopting a more functional, pro-active approach to the teaching of the target language which goes beyond the traditional practice of the four skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing) for their own sake, zooming in on what learners can actually do with the acquired linguistic competence when they communicate in a variety of contexts, constructing and conveying meaning multimodally, through all channels of communication (verbal, visual, auditory, kinesthetic), i.e. the focus is now on the four modes of communication: reception, production, interaction and mediation.
The present paper briefly outlines the content of this new component of the foreign language communicative competence construct (i.e. mediation) and goes on to illustrate the potential of using literary texts in the language classroom to develop learners’ mediation skills, thus adding one more aspect to the rich affordance of literature as a resource in language learning alongside the enhancement of students’ multimodal literacy.