This paper reports on a study that investigated teachers' perceptions about the significance of intercultural understanding (IU) in the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum. The research was conducted in the wake of a National Curriculum revision in 2007 in England that for the first time listed 'IU' as one of the four key concepts underpinning the study of languages in the Programme of Study. In contrast to other writers who frequently explain MFL teachers' attention to intercultural learning as a consequence of their (lack of) knowledge about intercultural languages theory or pedagogy, or as the result of contextual factors, our findings suggest that the significance attached to IU seems to be profoundly affected by the interests, personalities and life experiences of individuals. This finding emerged from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 teachers in 13 secondary schools in the North-West of England between May 2008 and June 2009. We illustrate our point by mapping the narratives of four teachers, conveyed through pen-portraits, with an adapted version of Kelchtermans's personal interpretive framework, and thus draw on narrative inquiry as our research approach. We claim that our hitherto relatively unnoticed finding, i.e. the central influence of the teacher as an individual on intercultural language teaching, has important implications for MFL teacher education. We suggest that the stories of the four teachers could be used as a professional development tool to identify motivators and inhibitors in developing IU that may resonate with practitioners' own beliefs and practice, and that parallel to this, our adapted Kelchtermans's framework may be used as a blank template to scaffold self analysis. Whilst this article considers teacher development in intercultural languages education, it also seeks to make a contribution to the literature on the usefulness of teacher narrative as a professional development tool.
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has a PhD in intercultural languages education. She is a Senior Lecturer in teacher education, specialising in modern languages education and teacher development. This paper reports findings from a small-scale project involving an online school exchange between two classes of 11/13 year olds located in the North of England and the Ruhr area of Germany. The overarching aim of the project was to develop intercultural understanding (IU) in foreign language learning through communication in an online environment. Analysing data from website posts, lesson observations, student questionnaires and interviews, the study documented emergent practical and pedagogical issues.Keywords: intercultural understanding; telecollaboration; beginner foreign language learning; secondary education, ethnographic learning. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Professor Michael Byram for his very helpful comments on a draft version of this paper. IntroductionThe impetus for a project based on virtual exchanges among students of lower secondary age studying German in England and English in Germany originated from the intention to move from the theoretical and policy rationale for developing intercultural understanding toward the development of pedagogical practice. I wanted to investigate whether, as argued by Thorne (2006), telecollaboration could provide a vehicle for enabling the so-called 'intercultural turn' in foreign language education. The inquiry set out not only to contribute to the research on online intercultural learning, which is still in its infancy (O'Dowd 2007), but to offer new insights into such projects with younger students, as telecollaborative endeavors have been conducted predominantly in Higher Education (HE) or, in some cases, with upper secondary school students (e.g. Bauer et al. 2006;Lázár 2014). With the exception of Dooly and Ellermann (2008), Dooly (2011) and Yang and Chen (2014, there has been relatively little research into telecollaboration with younger students. Furthermore, the latter four projects were conducted using English as a lingua franca, rather than the respective partners using their own and each other's language.The project was also inspired by the fact that Peiser and Jones (2013) discovered that the development of intercultural understanding (IU) amongst younger secondary school learners in England seems constrained if they come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Students in this group were found to attach less significance to IU as it can seem irrelevant to their current or future lives because they are less likely to have travelled and find it more difficult to imagine living, studying or working abroad. To Theoretical and policy context of the researchApplied linguists have identified an inseparable relationship between culture and language for many years (Risager 2006), thus, the study of culture has always been organic to foreign language pedagogy. Historically, this took place through the study of literature, although in the 1960s, pedagogy began to focus on the stu...
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