Intercultural Communicative Competence For Global Citizenship

This work builds on the assumption that language learning and teaching needs to be made more relevant to the 'glocalised' digital world we live in. Its authors argue that staff in Higher Education (HE) must prepare students for effective online interaction and explores the digital, linguistic and critical intercultural components of ‘global citizenship’. The book pivots around an innovative research study; linguistic politeness frameworks are revisited to analyse the written online exchanges on an Online International Learning (OIL) - or intercultural telecollaborative - project between the UK and France.Through the use of cyberpragmatics, and inspired by Meyer and Land’s ‘threshold concept pedagogy’, the authors examine the challenges and solutions identified by an ‘expert student’ in managing rules of engagement and intercultural awareness when interacting online. This book will appeal to students and scholars of applied linguistics, education, sociolinguistics and intercultural communication, and provide a valuable resource for teacher trainers, language teachers and educators across the world.

The contributors to this volume have collaborated to present their work on introducing competences in intercultural communication and citizenship into foreign language education. The book examines how learners and teachers think about citizenship and interculturality, and shows how teachers and researchers from primary to university education can work together across continents to develop new curricula and pedagogy. This involves the creation of a new theory of intercultural citizenship and a procedure for implementation. The book is written by teacher researchers who aim to help other teachers, and concludes with reflections on the lessons they have learnt which will help others to implement these ideas in their own practice. The book is essential reading for foreign language educators and researchers, students in pre-service teacher training and teachers in in-service training.

In light of increasing globalization, this collection makes the case for global citizenship education as a way forward for transforming foreign language learning and teaching to better address current and future global challenges in times of unprecedented change. The volume maps a multi-dimensional approach within foreign language pedagogy to take up the challenge of "educating the global citizen". Drawing on sociocultural, pedagogical, cosmopolitan, digital and civic-minded perspectives, the book explores the challenges in constructing epistemological frameworks in increasingly global environments, the need for developing context-sensitive educational practices, the potential of linking up with work from related disciplines, and the impact of these considerations on different educational settings. The collection reflects an international range of voices, attuned to global and local nuances, to offer a holistic compilation of conceptual innovations to showcase the relevance of global citizenship issues in foreign language education and encourage future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in intercultural education, foreign language education, and language teaching, as well as policymakers and foreign language teachers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Winner of the National Communication Association's International and Intercultural Communication Division's 2014 Outstanding Authored Book of the Year award This book engages the notion of cosmopolitanism as it applies to intercultural communication, which itself is undergoing a turn in its focus from post-positivistic research towards critical/interpretive and postcolonial perspectives, particularly as globalization informs more of the current and future research in the area. It emphasizes the postcolonial perspective in order to raise critical consciousness about the complexities of intercultural communication in a globalizing world, situating cosmopolitanism—the notion of global citizenship—as a multilayered lens for research. Cosmopolitanism as a theoretical repertoire provides nuanced descriptions of what it means to be and communicate as a global citizen, how to critically study interconnectedness within and across cultures, and how to embrace differences without glossing over them. Moving intercultural communication studies towards the global in complex and nuanced ways, this book highlights crucial links between globalization, transnationalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, social injustice and intercultural communication, and will help in the creation of classroom spaces devoted to exploring these links. It also engages the links between theory and praxis in order to move towards intercultural communication pedagogy and research that simultaneously celebrates and interrogates issues of cultural difference with the aim of creating continuity rather than chasms. In sum, this book orients intercultural communication scholarship firmly towards the critical and postcolonial, while still allowing the incorporation of traditional intercultural communication concepts, thereby preparing students, scholars, educators and interculturalists to communicate ethically in a world that is simultaneously global and local.

This book has explored in depth the beliefs and practices of foreign language teachers regarding global awareness in the context of a Chinese senior high school. This book defines global awareness as a combination of global knowledge, global attitudes, and global skills for a global citizen to act from the local community to the global community. By analysing qualitative data such as classroom observations, interviews and focus groups with language teachers and linking these findings to language education policy and practice in China, this book has explored how English language teachers teach English language, intercultural communicative competence and global awareness in China. This book will be of interest to researchers, language teachers and students in the fields of language education and intercultural communication. It also provides a readable overview for those new to the field of ICC and global citizenship education.

This collection of essays analyses the evolution of theory of intercultural competence and its relationship to education for citizenship. It does so by analysing the concepts of intercultural competence, including the notion of the intercultural speaker, by discussing the ways in which language education policy develops and by comparing the theories and purposes of foreign language education and education for citizenship.

This book explores the benefits of teaching reflection upon one’s own culture to develop intercultural competence and looks into the relationship between the proficiency level of the second language and the target culture. It introduces new debates on the concept of ‘critical cultural awareness’ in intercultural learning and teaching, for example the indiscriminate use of terminologies related to the idea of ‘intercultural encounters’. Also, it provides insight into the relationship between language and culture using a new tool such as the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media. The presentation of different approaches, tools, barriers, educational and cultural realities, online intercultural exchange projects and concepts such as motivation, attitudes, stereotyping, otherization, and critical cultural awareness makes this book an excellent instrument not only for teachers but also for researchers, policy-makers and private and public institutions that want to explore culture and interculturality and to promote an intercultural competence and global citizenship among its learners / users / clients and / or an interculturally-oriented language education.

The modern world becomes significantly, even exponentially, more interconnected with each passing year, month, and even day. The global flow of goods, services, news, ideas, and cultural practices and perspectives provides individuals with opportunities to experience and participate in an unprecedented array of intercultural experiences. All of this defines a new global situation and requires new approaches to educating students to not only survive but prosper on this new geopolitical landscape. This requires that we venture into ethical and spiritual dimensions of the process if we are to go about it in a humane and psychospiritually productive way. This book, in the case study tradition, examined the lived experiences of 12 former high school students who participated in an exchange trip to Argentina, in connection with intercultural competency development.