Symposium "Does pedagogy have any impact on oral and writing competencies?"

This symposium focuses on written-based skills (reading and writing) and on oral-based skills (listening and speaking), and on their relationship in L1 or L2 or both. The pedagogy of oral and writing competencies in multicodal and multimodal contexts (Elbow, 2012) has a great impact on interrelationship of opportunities to learn because of support the right pedagogical codes (Bernstein, 1984). All these skills have to be acquired up to a certain ability to manage and solve real communication problems in the complex modern society in 21th century. This is shown in educational settings by the concepts of literacy, in schools by OECD definitions in world-wide PISA testings (OECD, 2001). Nevertheless we need more research, spatially to explain how to get better results in all literate skills (Graham & Harris, 2014) in order to bridge the gap between research and praxis. Today, teaching good writing emphasizes not only skills, but also styles and genres. Teachers and educators provide their students with tools for examining the different qualities of the language, helping them to adjust their language to a specific purpose and, most of all, to express their own voice. Language education points out the mutual relationship between speaking and writing and seeks the social-cultural source of the unique voice of each one of us. The participants will present topics, such as cognitive abilities that improve writing competence; assessment in the service of improving literacies; pedagogical and technological activities that enhance competencies; and, the writer's voice and academic writing. We will discuss how pedagogy impacts literacy and the ways by which the findings or results of our studies may be translated to pedagogical language/praxis in specific mother tongues.

collaborative organisation with Irit Haskel-Shaham – The David Yellin Academic College of Education & Elina Harjunen – University of Helsinki