Re-Writing the Goals of Foreign Language Teaching: The Achievement of Multiple Literacies and Symbolic Competence

Since the 70s, foreign language departments have seen communicative competence as the desired outcome of the language learning process and have used communicative teaching approaches––mainly Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)––to achieve that goal. The increasing demands that learners face due to the spread of globalization have called into question the appropriateness of those goals and methods. As a result of this questioning, FL departments are now in the process of rethinking their curricula and pedagogies. A construct that has emerged as a possible new organizing principle is literacy. In this paper, I explore the rationale and implications of using this construct (literacy) to articulate and redefine the goals of FL programs, and some of the characteristics of a literacy-based curriculum. I will propose that such curricula will deliver what Kramsch (2008) has called “symbolic competence”. I will end by discussing some of the hurdles that lie in the way of the implementation of the changes proposed.