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More Than a Native Speaker?
In the end, if all instruction has been successful, what should our
‘intercultural’ L2 learner look like? As already noted, the spoken or
unspoken goal of L2 instruction and learning has been ‘native-speaker pro-
ficiency’, a nebulous and rarely attained goal. As Kramsch (1998) observes,
the concept of native-speaker competence has been subject to re-evaluation
over the past two decades (e.g. Davies, 1991; Kachru, 1986; Widdowson,
1994), and Byram’s promotion of ‘intercultural’ communicative compe-
tence’ further prompts a re-examination of ‘native-speaker’ competence as
the ultimate goal of language learning. Intercultural L2 learners are both
less and more skilled than a monolingual native speaker. They are less
skilled in so far as they do not have complete mastery of the L2 language
system. Errors have always been judged harshly by L2 teachers, but
probably less harshly by those outside the educational system (cf. Loveday,
1981: 147–8). Loveday (1981: 125–75) observes that the criterion for ‘correct’
spoken English for the L2 learner is standard English, which is itself based
on a codification of a written variety of the language used by the educated
and powerful. Few native English-speakers entirely conform to ‘standard
English’ in their own output, but even today, when recordings have intro-
Implementing an Intercultural Approach
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duced a great variety of accents into the L2 classroom, there is still
relatively little systematic attention paid to non-standard dialects (cf.
Corbett, 2000). It is ironic that L2 learners are often required institutionally
to conform to standards that are more rigorous than those applied to native
speakers. Of course, dialect-speakers’ ‘errors’ do not arise because of
incomplete mastery of the L1 system – the stigmatised ‘errors’ of dialect-
speakers are only regarded as such in relation to the standard variety.
Dialect features are usually completely systematic and intelligible within
their own context, and they are used at least in part to signify alignment
with a particular social or regional group of speakers, in the same way that
use of the standard variety shows affiliation to elite, educated or powerful
groups.
In the intercultural curriculum, near-native mastery of the elite L2
variety is not the unspoken goal. Instead, the ‘intercultural’ or ‘trans-
cultural’ speaker is the ideal (cf. Kramsch, 1998; Risager, 1998). Kramsch
(1998) sees the ‘intercultural’ speaker as one who moves easily between
discourse communities – communities encountered at home, school, work
and play – observing and applying the language that is appropriate to each
community. Language learners’ knowledge of different languages and
cultures makes them more skilled than monolingual native speakers.
Intercultural communicative competence, for Kramsch, is not knowledge,
but ‘shared rules of interpretation’ that are applied judiciously to familiar
and new contexts to make sense of the world (Kramsch, 1998: 27). Risager’s
notion of learning to be a ‘transcultural’ speaker is also conditioned by the
fact that it is increasingly apparent that learners do not belong to a single
monocultural and monolinguistic bloc:
The transcultural approach takes as its point of departure the interwo-
ven character of cultures as a common condition for the whole world:
cultures penetrate each other in changing combinations by virtue of
extensive migration and tourism, world wide communication systems
for mass and private communication, economic interdependence and
the globalisation of the production of goods. (Risager, 1998: 248)
If even national identity is a consequence of a group’s construction of a
powerful ‘imagined community’ (cf. Anderson, 1991) then the cultural
affiliations that the individual learner forges or renounces by travel, corre-
spondence, participation in email discussion groups, education,
immigration, and so on, are likely to be equally powerful and important in
determining his or her language use and preferences. The ‘intercultural’ or,
in Risager’s terms, ‘transcultural’ learner is one who is linguistically adept
(although not ‘native-speaker’ proficient), who has skills which enable him
or her to identify cultural norms and values that are often implicit in the
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Intercultural Approaches to ELT
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language and behaviour of the groups he or she meets, and who can articu-
late and negotiate a position with respect to those norms and values. In
achieving this, the learner may become more skilled – in Kramsch’s (1998)
terms, more ‘privileged’ – than a mere monolingual speaker of the target
language.
Having discussed at length the objectives of the intercultural curricu-
lum, we turn now to the question of how it is to be implemented in the
classroom. As noted earlier, implementing an intercultural curriculum
does not mean that the teacher has to abandon communicative tasks. These
can be adapted to provide materials for raising intercultural awareness by
reflecting on culturally specific patterns of behaviour. The tasks may range
from a 15-minute activity to a long-term project and report. However, the
framework devised by Nunan (1989) for designing communicative tasks
can be adapted as the basis for many intercultural tasks.
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