1st Conference on Multi-Literacy
Details
Welcome to the 1st International Conference on Multi-Literacy of Adults in Second Languages. The event focuses on literacy training for adults who need or want to learn a language other than their mother tongue. It also encompasses the training of adult migrants and refugees learning the language of the host country. This is a multi-literacy process, as understanding and using a language in a meaningful way implies being able to make sense of it in multiple linguistic, social or cultural contexts. All of this requires the mastery of specific skills and knowledge for the communicative process to be successful. Moreover, modern information and communication media demand an increasingly multimodal approach. Meaning is no longer only accessed, or created, through written media, but interacts with audiovisual, spatial, gestural modes of communication.
The conference invites reflection on the needs and current situation of this adult population and on how their multi-literacy process takes place, in order to lay the foundations for a multimodal approach that facilitates the literacy process for a greater diversity of learners. To this end, the training of language educators needs to be aware of and responsive to the needs of learners in our multimodal reality. Such attention is all the more necessary when learners approach the second language with little or no literacy in the mother tongue, or when the languages and their contexts are so far apart that knowledge of one can hardly be conducive to learning the other. In this context, the development of mediation skills, as presented in the CEFR (2020), may be key.
