Imagine you want to submit an entry in a newspaper column writing contest for students. Based on the contest guidelines, any significant topic that people must understand nowadays will be one of the key criteria. You decided to write an informative article about the role and importance of being media and information literate. Develop your ideas with a main point followed by an explanation and example. Remember to check the clarity and organization of your ideas to achieve your purpose.
Answers
If it is accepted that the different dimensions highlighted above are interrelated in all
forms of language use and learning, then any act of language learning or teaching is in
some way concerned with each of these dimensions: strategies, tasks, texts, an individual’s general competences, communicative language competence, language activities,
language processes, contexts and domains.
At the same time, it is also possible in learning and teaching that the objective, and
therefore assessment, may be focused on a particular component or sub-component (the
other components then being considered as means to an end, or as aspects to be given
more emphasis at other times, or as not being relevant to the circumstances). Learners,
teachers, course designers, authors of teaching material and test designers are inevitably involved in this process of focusing on a particular dimension and deciding on the
extent to which other dimensions should be considered and ways of taking account of
these: this is illustrated with examples below. It is immediately clear, however, that
although the often stated aim of a teaching/learning programme is to develop communication skills (possibly because this is most representative of a methodological
approach?), certain programmes in reality strive to achieve a qualitative or quantitative
development of language activities in a foreign language, others stress performance in a
particular domain, yet others the development of certain general competences, while
others are primarily concerned with refining strategies. The claim that ‘everything is
connected’ does not mean that the objectives cannot be differentiated.
Each of the main categories outlined above can be divided into sub-categories, still very