Developing Intercultural Perspectives On Language Use

Many language teachers recognise the importance of integrating intercultural learning into language learning, but how this can be best achieved is not always apparent. This is particularly the case in foreign language learning contexts where teachers are working with a prescribed textbook and opportunities to use the language outside the classroom are limited. This book argues that teachers can work creatively with conventional resources and utilise classroom experiences in order to help learners interpret aspects of communication in insightful ways and develop awareness of the influence of cultural assumptions and values on language use. The book provides extensive analysis of a range of classroom interactions to demonstrate how teachers and learners can work together to construct opportunities for intercultural learning through reflection on pragmatics.

This book provides a contemporary and critical examination of the theoretical and pedagogical impact of Michael Byram’s pioneering work on intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship within the field of language education and beyond. The chapters address important theoretical and empirical work on the teaching, learning, and assessment of intercultural learning, and highlight how individual language educators and communities of practice enact intercultural learning in locally appropriate ways. The book offers comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible knowledge for researchers, teachers, teacher-trainers and students.

Developing Intercultural Language Materials puts intercultural competence at the forefront of the learning agenda. It unpicks its underlying theory and provides a framework and practical methodologies for practitioners, providing a toolkit for them to create their own learning materials and design their own classroom activities to nurture intercultural competence. This innovative book showcases some of the new ways language teachers in practice successfully integrate this essential skill into their curricula. Directions for further research, pulling out recurring threads in this book, such as critical pedagogy and cultural sensibility, offer opportunities for professional development. This research‐grounded and action‐oriented text is essential reading for language and cultural studies practitioners who want to help their students thrive in today’s multicultural world.

This book presents a detailed account of a self-study in which the author considers why a developmental perspective matters in language learning within an intercultural orientation, and how teachers of languages might understand and attend to this notion in their work. The discussion is based on the author’s experience as a teacher-researcher and traces aspects of teachers’ work from planning, teaching and mediating, to assessing and judging evidence of student learning and development over time. This book is grounded in a praxis view of language teaching and learning and will be of interest to other language teachers, pre-service teachers, teacher trainers and applied linguists.

Language learning materials development remains a surprisingly under-supported aspect of language teaching. This book constitutes a much-needed resource in the area, aiming to support and advance the craft of materials design. The volume offers a snapshot of the contemporary influences on language learning materials development from diverse perspectives around the globe. These influences include the demands of teaching ESOL in Britain and Ireland, the impact of Corpus Linguistics, the needs of young learners and of diverse worldwide audiences, the development of intercultural competence, as well as the integration of L2 acquisition research. Contributors to the volume are drawn from a broad range of teaching, research and materials development backgrounds. The book includes some chapters based on papers given at the MATSDA (Materials Development Association) 2008 conference.

Eva Alcón Soler Maria Pilar Safont Jordà Universitat Jaume I, Spain The main purpose of the present book is to broaden the scope of research on the development of intercultural communicative competence. Bearing this purpose in mind, English learners are considered as intercultural speakers who share their interest for engaging in real life communication. According to Byram and Fleming (1998), the intercultural speaker is someone with knowledge of one or more cultures and social identities, and who enjoys discovering and maintaining relationships with people from other cultural backgrounds, although s/he has not been formally trained for that purpose. Besides, possessing knowledge of at least two cultures is the case of many learners in bilingual or multilingual communities. In these contexts, the objective of language learning should then focus on developing intercultural competence, which in turn may involve promoting language diversity while encouraging English as both a means and an end of instruction (see Alcón, this volume). This is the idea underlying the volume, which further sustains Kramsch’s argument (1998) against the native/ non-native dichotomy. Following that author, we also believe that in a multilingual world where learners may belong to more than one speech community, their main goal is not to become a native speaker of English, but to use this language as a tool for interaction among many other languages and cultures.

Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective addresses the ways in which language learning is related to learning about other cultures and to acquiring an ability to communicate across cultural frontiers. It argues that language learners need to develop sensitivity to cultural difference and its impact on communication, and to acquire the skills of discovering and interpreting other cultures, other values, beliefs and behaviours which lie beneath the surface of cross-cultural communication. Contributors show how drama can be used to develop cultural awareness and how learners can acquire ethnographic skills to help them investigate and understand socio-cultural aspects of language which play an important role in second language acquisition. The contributors are all respected educationalists from a range of countries and different cultural contexts.

This volume responds to the growing need for intercultural approaches to teaching and learning languages. The central premise is that the aim of intercultural language teaching and learning is to foster effective communication and effective learning in spaces between cultures in order to prepare learners for global citizenship, but that the corresponding models and methods must emerge from the bottom-up in order to meet the needs of each unique context. The book offers a collection of successful experiences rooted in praxis. It shares the activities, methods, models, and approaches which have been developed within specific contexts. Thus, it offers an example of how to adopt an “intercultural perspective” in teaching and learning. The editors and contributors share the conviction that the experiences detailed here can be informative to the realities of all readers in the same way that their own practices have been informed by others.