Languages for intercultural communication and education

Implementing an Intercultural
Approach
This chapter focuses more directly on intercultural communicative compe-
tence by addressing the following issues:
•
Defining intercultural communicative competence (the ‘savoirs’).
•
The desirability of intercultural learning.
•
Learners as ethnographers.
•
The needs of different learners.
•
Replacing ‘native speaker competence’ with ‘intercultural communicative
competence’.
•
Task design in the intercultural classroom
.
Beyond the Information Gap: Defining Intercultural Learning
As we saw in the previous chapter, in a ‘general’ communicative
language curriculum, cultural competence has traditionally been considered
as knowledge about the ‘life and institutions’ of the target culture. By contrast,
immigrant learners have been urged to learn and mimic the cultural behav-
iours of the host community, in order to pass as ‘normal’ members of the target
culture. Cultural knowledge in the latter case has been directed at prompting
learners to modify their behaviour patterns towards those favoured by the
target community. Increasingly, however, in modern languages teaching,
‘intercultural communicative competence’ (ICC) is being seen as a complex
combination of valuable knowledge and skills. Byram (1997b) has produced
what is to date the most fully worked-out specification of intercultural compe-
tence, which involves five so-called
savoirs
, that is, five formulations of the
kinds of knowledge and skills needed to mediate between cultures. Together
these
savoirs
indicate the student’s ability to reach Kramsch’s ‘third place’, that
is, a vantage point from which the learner can understand and mediate
between the home culture and the target culture (Kramsch, 1993). These are
specified as follows (adapted from Byram, 1997b: 34):
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(1) Knowledge of self and other; of how interaction occurs; of the relation-
ship of the individual to society.
(2) Knowing how to interpret and relate information.
(3) Knowing how to engage with the political consequences of education;
being critically aware of cultural behaviours.
(4) Knowing how to discover cultural information.
(5) Knowing how to be: how to relativise oneself and value the attitudes
and beliefs of the other.
This set of
savoirs
incorporates and transforms the goals of communica-
tive curricula, even those in which culture found some kind of place. In an
intercultural curriculum, the learner is still expected to accumulate facts
about the target culture, and know something of how people from the
target culture might be expected to behave. To these stipulations are
added an ethnographic perspective (in so far as students are expected to
demonstrate ‘discovery’ skills), a critical stance (knowledge of the behav-
iours of the target culture should prompt comparison and reflection
rather than automatic imitation), and a liberal morality (learners should
demonstrate the skills of decentring and valuing, or at least tolerating,
other cultures).
However, developing intercultural competence does not mean doing
away with the information gap or related activities, but developing them so
that (1) culture becomes a regular focus of the information exchanged, and
(2) learners have the opportunity to reflect upon
how
the information is
exchanged, and the cultural factors impinging upon the exchange. There
has always been a range of information gap activities: some involving the
exchange of knowledge between partners, some involving the building up
of knowledge from diverse sources (e.g. ‘jigsaw’ reading and listening),
some involving the transfer of information (from visual images to verbal
descriptions, and vice versa), and some involving the expression of
differing personal opinions (e.g. ranking exercises, where learners must
discuss their preferred holiday destination, their favourite artwork, and so
on). These activities lend themselves not only to the promotion of fluency,
but also, potentially, to increased awareness of culture.
A common criticism of some ‘general’ ELT courses in the past is that the
content is frequently banal: the emphasis on skills trivialises the content. In
the later 1980s there was a movement towards teaching foreign languages
through a variety of topics, and, at its most radical, through instruction in
some other discipline – in a some schools a subject such as Geography was
taught through a modern language, such as French. At its logical extreme,
this tendency led to ‘immersion’ courses, the best-known being the
Canadian schools in which anglophone children received much or all of
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their education in French, and vice versa. Taking ‘culture’ as a topic has the
advantage of direct relevance to the learning of another language, and the
motivational factor of simultaneously encouraging enquiry into and
review of one’s own cultural habits. Intercultural enquiry can be used as
the topic base of a curriculum. At the same time, cultural enquiry and
reflection can shape and reshape
how
the information is exchanged in other
arenas: factual writing, spoken conversation, role plays, simulations and
the other staples of the language curriculum. In short, the intercultural
language course involves the designing and implementing of tasks which
encourage the learner actively and systematically to seek cultural informa-
tion, which then impacts upon his or her language behaviour.
In order to design and implement such a course the ELT professional
needs certain types of information and knowledge of certain strategies – for
example, the way that language genres serve cultural needs, how language
can negotiate cultural identity, and how written, spoken and visual texts
can be ‘read’ as messages about cultural affiliation. This chapter shows
how established means of task design for communicative teaching can be
adapted to serve intercultural ends. Succeeding chapters seek to impart
key knowledge about topics relevant to intercultural teaching across a
range of subjects, as well as practical suggestions about how this
knowledge can be transformed into classroom practice.