Enhancing multimodal communicative competence in ESP: the case of job interviews

Abstract

Abstract ESP teaching has traditionally centred on the discourse practices of specific genres to develop students’ discursive competence in the target language. However, with the advent of studies on multimodality, there has been a growing recognition that new pedagogical approaches are required in ESP teaching. In this study, we discuss a research-informed pedagogical proposal to deal with job interviews, a highly routinised spoken genre that is typically addressed in Business English courses. Drawing on previous literature (Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2015). The things you do to know: an introduction to the pedagogy of multiliteracies. In: Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (Eds.), A pedagogy of multiliteracies. Learning by design. Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire, pp. 1–36; Lim, F.V. (2018). Developing a systemic functional approach to teach multimodal literacy. Funct. Ling. 5: 1–17), we present a pedagogical proposal that aims to promote students’ awareness of the multimodal nature of job interviews and develop their multimodal communicative competence through instruction, practice and feedback.