Oral communication is key to students’ classroom success and a skill that is highly valued in both academic and professional contexts, yet there are few resources for developing courses on oral academic communication. This edited collection gathers TESOL scholars and practitioners in exploring the theories, principles, and pedagogical practices that shape and help innovate the teaching of oral communication in higher education.

Pedagogical Innovations in Oral Academic Communication is grounded in four key principles: academic discourse socialization; context-responsive instruction; instructional approaches of English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes; and asset-oriented pedagogy. In the chapters in this collection, the authors share their teaching context, the details and underlying principles of their pedagogical approach, and recommendations for practitioners. Readers will develop a deeper understanding of the communicative contexts their students inhabit, including the types of speaking situations they are likely to encounter, and understand how to innovate their approach to teaching oral communication to students from diverse cultural, linguistic, educational, and disciplinary backgrounds. Such innovations prepare students for more effective communication during their academic studies and professional career, a goal that is of central importance in our globally interconnected society.

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.