Using a Genre-Based and Multimodal Approach to Teach Oral Academic Communication

Effective oral academic communication is central to multilingual students’ engagement as learners and their success in academic and professional domains. This Brief Instructional Guide provides readers with an established set of principles and a pedagogical toolkit for teaching oral academic communication to multilingual international students with a specific focus on genre-based instruction and multimodality. It covers standard oral genres such as presentations and class discussions, as well as a wide variety of communicative genres that enable students to gain rhetorical awareness and communicative competence. This book introduces a model course design and its guiding principles, then explicitly describes a variety of oral communication assignments that promote engaged learning, including steps in the instructional sequence, tips for teaching, and sample guidance to be shared with students. It emphasizes the importance of leveraging students’ cultural and linguistic strengths and global experiences to promote their agency as learners. The principles and practices described in this book are grounded in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) context, but are easily adaptable to other instructional settings and teaching modalities. Implementing a genre-based and multimodal approach helps build students’ rhetorical awareness, increases their communicative capacity, and enables them to participate actively in their academic discourse communities.