An emphasis on the development of literacy as a fluid concept (Knobel and Lankshear, 2014) is one of the most recent advances in twenty-first-century education. To conceptualize literacy, the ability of the learner to make use of language takes precedence in typical Western educational systems. However, as Kern highlights, “literacy is more than a set of academic skills” (2000, 23). It varies depending on the social context and is embedded in cultural practice (Paesani et al. 2016).

   Therefore, in order to define it, we must take into consideration the set of resources, sociocultural practices and competences––beyond reading and writing––that enable student interaction, critical thinking, the drawing of conclusions and the application of knowledge to curricular areas and realworld situations (New London Group 1996; Kern 2000; American Association of School Librarians (AASL) 2011; Cooper et al. 2012; Kucer 2014; Paesani et al. 2016; Reyes-Torres 2018; Warner and Dupuy 2018). As such, the multimodal training approach that we propose for the FL class stems from Kern’s notion of literacy, first, “as a process of creating and transforming knowledge” (2000, 29), and second, “as a matter of engaging in the ever-developing process of using reading and writing as tools for thinking and learning, in order to expand one’s understanding of oneself and the world” (40). This involves paying careful attention to language, while also developing a critical awareness of the relationships between texts, images, discourse conventions and sociocultural and digital contexts.

   In sum, and in consonance with Kern and other scholars such as the NLG (1996), Steve Kucer (2014), Maria Brisk (2015), Paesani et al. (2016) and Shari Tishman (2018), we define literacy as a dynamic and multidimensional concept whose main aim is to provide twenty-first-century learners with the language skills, visual thinking strategies and dialogic attitudes that are necessary to develop the knowledge that allows them to grasp and evaluate information, organize ideas, exchange perspectives, construct meaning and reflect critically on a variety of sociocultural contexts. In order to foster such a multidimensional approach to literacy in EFL and implement it as an organizing principle (Kress 2010; Serafini 2014), it is necessary that teachers become acquainted with the three dimensions that both Kern (2000) and Kucer (2014) acknowledge as the key components: a) cognitive; b) conceptual; and c) sociocultural. 

   These dimensions constitute a field of forces that complement one another and are equally important in the process of both teaching and learning, and they also illustrate the multiple facets and fluid nature of literacy.

Adapted from: FERNÁNDEZ, Teresa; REYES-TORRES, Agustín; FERNÁNDEZ, Pilar. A multimodal approach to foster the multiliteracies pedagogy in the English as a Foreign Language context. ATLANTIS: Journal of the Spanish Association of AngloAmerican Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 94–119, 2020. Available at: https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/741. Accessed on: Mar. 21, 2025.