A Sociocultural Approach to Updating the Teaching of Reading and Listening in English

For many years ELT methodology has given considerable attention to the questions of teaching reading and listening /R L/ in English as communicative language activities, focusing mostly on how to develop students’ comprehension skills that are necessary for their effective communication with native speakers. But what is still badly needed right now is to develop R L pedagogy with a cross-cultural or pluricultural dimension that would help to create step-by-step relevant information basis for developing students as active intercultural listeners and readers. The paper argues that it is a good time to make a methodological shift in ELT from teaching R L simply as language activities to teaching cross-cultural and/or pluricultural reading listening for the purposes of helping students become positive (though not naïve), confident and flexible partners in intercultural communication in today’s though globalized, but still culturally diverse and turbulent world. The paper gives an overview of what has been done in the ELT field under consideration and outlines some key postulates of the sociocultural approach to teaching international languages and comments on how they can be applied to R L in the context of the dialogue of cultures and civilisations. It discusses some basic principles of selecting aural, visual and audio-visual texts for creating an appropriate cross-cultural or pluricultural space in the English classroom (the principles of didactic appropriateness, communicative sociocultural values for students’ as potential intercultural speakers). Besides, it also offers a set of ELT principles of teaching the art of R L for the purposes of students’ intercultural communication worldwide.