Our world is changing fast. We need to prepare students with skills and experiences beyond simply learning English.
Our research-backed resources, frameworks and products support learners to develop skills for life. These include those they need to achieve their goals. For example, we support learners with wellbeing and emotional development. We also cover employability, creative and critical thinking, and communication skills.
Supporting life competencies
We created the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework to help you support learners to develop key skills. We call these Competencies. They include creative thinking, critical thinking and communication in the language classroom.
Language classrooms are engaging and collaborative. This makes them the perfect place to develop these skills. It's why the Framework is designed to be practical and is grounded in classroom practice.
Sustainability in English language teaching
As teachers and educators, you play an important role in your learners' lives. This includes helping them develop the skills they need to flourish.
Sustainability can bring conversations of local and global interest into the classroom. These can help learners to use English to discuss real-world issues. They can also support them to develop the skills to live more sustainably. For example, becoming more responsible citizens. Or, playing an active part in shaping their worlds.
That's why we've developed the Sustainability Framework for ELT. It makes it easier for you to integrate sustainability skills into your lessons. It is a way of understanding the different skills learners need to become informed, compassionate, and innovative agents for positive environmental, social, and economic transformation.
Employability skills
Employability is about more than having the right qualifications or technical skills. To be successful in the workplace, you also need to develop transferable core skills. You also need the right attitude.
That's why we developed our Employability Skills Framework for ELT. It can help you understand the different skills that employees and potential employees need to develop. This is in addition to learning English.
The framework is based on extensive research into employer needs. It's also aligned with the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework. It provides a map of the most important employability skills. This can help you gain a deeper understanding of each skill. It can also help you integrate them more systematically into your teaching.
Mediation
Mediation is the skill of using reading, writing, listening, and speaking to communicate information from one person or group to another. It is identified in the CEFR Companion Volume as a valuable skill in many contexts, such as summarising a discussion task for a teacher, or distilling and condensing information for colleagues. Mediation can also serve cross-linguistic social purposes, such as interpreting a conversation between speakers of different first languages.
Cambridge coursebooks frequently employ tasks that require paraphrasing, note-taking, and group discussion. These tasks help learners develop the skill of mediation by giving them opportunities to practice transferring information from one format to another, and to collaborate with others to achieve a common goal.
Oracy – Improving communication skills
Oracy is the ability to communicate effectively through spoken language. It's a key area of development in our most popular coursebooks.
We have harnessed the research that went into the Oracy Skills Framework's development. We're using it to support teachers and learners. This includes helping them to understand physical, linguistic, cognitive, social and emotional skills. These allow for successful discussion, inspiring speech and effective communication.
Our coursebooks help learners to practice these skills in many contexts. We also offer teacher resources. These provide guidance on helping your students to effectively build their oracy skills.
To see a course that fully utilises oracy, take a look at our Cambridge Primary Path.