Languages for intercultural communication and education

Conclusion
An intercultural approach to ELT demands the fostering of skills of
observation, interpretation and critical cultural awareness. Teachers can
therefore usefully exploit the potential of visual images to construct
messages, often in association with verbal text. The exploitation of visual
aids to foster critical cultural awareness is particularly attractive because it
extends practices familiar to teachers who currently use images to promote
comprehension and to generate spoken and written English. By moving
from understanding to more explicit modes of interpretation, however, we
move our students into the area of intercultural learning.
The potential of developing visual literacy to raise intercultural
awareness is particularly great in an ELT context. If ethnographic visits are
too expensive or difficult to arrange, then visual materials can at least be
brought into the classroom and compared with visuals from the home
culture. This procedure cannot of course replicate or satisfactorily substi-
tute for a visit overseas, but it can nevertheless provide a rich source of
intercultural comparison. Visual materials can be supplemented by other
cultural phenomena from the target culture – media texts, literature and
certain ‘ways of behaving’. These phenomena are the focus of the next
chapter.
Developing Visual Literacy
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Chapter 8
Using Literary, Media and Cultural
Studies
In Chapter 7 we considered the use of visual images as a rich resource for
developing the intercultural skills of interpretation and critical awareness.
This chapter continues the theme of developing interpretation and critical
awareness by exploring insights from a broad subject, namely the applica-
tion in the intercultural classroom of strategies from the disciplines of
literary, media and cultural studies. Topics addressed include:
•
Interpretation in English Language Teaching.
•
A model of discourse production and processing.
•
Using ‘cultural texts’ in the intercultural classroom (i.e. texts from literary,
media and cultural studies).
•
Contrasting ‘mediated’ and ‘unmediated’ discourse, with particular refer-
ence to television interviews and ‘conversational’ dialogue in sitcoms.