Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue

Abstract

Language teaching has long been associated with teaching in a country or countries where a target language is spoken, but this approach is inadequate. In the contemporary world, language teaching has a responsibility to prepare learners for interaction with people of other cultural backgrounds, teaching them skills and attitudes as well as knowledge. This article presents the main concepts involved in this view of language teaching: the notion of culture, the language‐culture nexus, and intercultural competence. It also explains the implications of the approach in terms of the skills, attitudes, and knowledge that should be taught. The article goes further: It argues that language teaching needs to be linked to other disciplines in order to develop an approach that integrates insights from citizenship education. All of this has implications for teachers’ professional identity and for cooperation across the curriculum.

Staging transformative learning across collegiate language curricula: Student perceptions of structured reflection for language learning

“…The use of SR creates intentional space and regular occasions for a reflective practice that, as many transformative learning practitioners have pointed out, is a prerequisite for perspective transformation. There are distinct echoes of this in Byram and colleagues’ repeated calls for critical reflection as a way of developing intercultural competence and citizenship (e.g., Byram & Wagner, 2018; Byram, 1997). The central finding that collegiate L2 learners see value in doing SR within the context of learning another language underscores the instrumental role that language education can play in teaching students critical reflection skills that relate to broader learning outcomes found in higher education.…”

Affordances, complexities, and challenges of intercultural citizenship for foreign language teachers

“… This article explores the intercultural and citizenship dimensions of foreign language teaching and discusses, in particular, the implications for foreign language teaching and teacher education. The work (1) extends the fundamental concepts that were developed by Byram and Wagner () in this journal—that foreign language education has instrumental purposes but also educational aims that constitute the development of the individual and of societies by fostering democratic competences and values and linking the language learning that takes place in classrooms with the community, whether local, regional, or global; and (2) links language education and community engagement in the form of service‐learning, which was also addressed in this journal by Palpacuer Lee, Curtis, and Curran (). An intercultural citizenship project carried out in Argentina serves as illustration.…”

Intercultural Learning: A Promising Pedagogy in the New Millennium

“…These qualifications lie in how one views the world, the knowledge one has about the world of origin and the other culture, in addition to the skills one has to have in order to act appropriately in intercultural encounters. On this basis, it is argued that teachers can contribute positively to the development of intercultural competence; however, much emphasis should be laid on the teaching pedagogy needed (Byram & Wagner, 2018).…”