ELT, 21st Century Skills, the Climate Emergency and You

ELT, 21st century skills, the climate emergency and you.

One of the main challenges around integrating 21st century skills into ELT (apart from their assessment) is that they can often feel irrelevant to the learners. They don’t seem to have any immediate use, or application to the learners’ realities. This is partly a product of their nature but also a product of the way they are presented in many course books.

The interaction between ELT and the global climate emergency has been moving up the agenda of our community in recent years, and this talk will look at ways that the 21st century skills can help our learners engage with the crisis. For example, critical thinking can help them uncover ‘greenwashing’, communication support them with eco-campaigning, and collaboration can support them in working on school gardens or beach cleaning projects and writing up the process. This approach can help us…