The cultural dimensions of language teaching and learning

Risager, Karen

doi:10.1017/s0261444811000280

Cited by 48 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The findings of this research seem to confirm that both, foreign language learning and developing intercultural competence draw on the meaning negotiating process acquired in the first linguaculture, as proposed by Risager (2012). Developing a deeper awareness of this negotiating process and an understanding of the principles at work in transnational interactions can help us establish a dialogue between underlying universal cultural processes and the particularities of national or other structures, thus enabling a process of negotiation and coconstruction of meaning that can help us communicate more successfully across cultural boundaries, as advanced by Holliday (2012).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: The case of the IEREST project

Čebron

2017

SSLLT

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The paper presents the core aims and objectives of the teaching materials developed within the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) project, and shows how the innovative approach adopted for these activities can be implemented in the classroom. The IEREST teaching modules are innovative in that the approach adopted draws strongly on the notions of critical cosmopolitanism (Holliday 2012) and intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997 and. The activities in the modules promote a view of culture as a negotiated "process" among individuals, small or large groups and intercultural communication as a co-construction of meaning conveyed across linguistic and cultural boundaries, thus rejecting explicitly any "essentialist" attitudes and simplistic overgeneralisation of "otherness." The approach to language use in intercultural encounters observes how the above concepts are expressed in a number of contexts, while also building on the view that intercultural communication among bilinguals often takes advantage of a lingua franca, a foreign language that all the participants in the communicative activity have in common because they had learned it. Taking into account the concept of "linguaculture" (Risager 2012) the modules seek to raise awareness of the negotiating process in rendering meaning through a linguistic and cultural blend of both the target language and the speake's first language. 212The paradigm shift proposed by the IEREST Modules indicates a need to rethink current practices in intercultural education and to acknowledge societal changes in multilingual Europe and beyond.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: The case of the IEREST project

Čebron

2017

SSLLT

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“…CLIL has been officially endorsed by the European Commission since 1996 and, according to Coyle (2008, p. 98): "In the 1990's, the European Commission was instrumental in promoting a reconceptualisation of these diverse models into the European phenomenon of CLIL -an evolution which has taken over 10 years and is continuing". Moreover, Kramsch (2011a, p. 356), one of the forerunners of intercultural education precepts and of their interdependence when it comes to second/foreign language teaching and learning, established a clear link between intercultural competence and languages, thus confirming a long tradition represented by other scholars who had intensely debated on this connection (see Risager, 2011 for a review of the most important studies in the field). Therefore, since culture and languages (more specifically, interculture and bilingual education in this paper) undoubtedly constitute a binomial, Coyle's (1999Coyle's ( , 2002Coyle's ( , 2006Coyle's ( , 2007 theoretical and practical framework of the four Cs provided CLIL with a powerful tool on which much research and implementation has been carried out.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Most international organisms and institutions, including UNESCO and OECD, recognise the need to enhance 21 st century students' skills and attitudes to communicate interculturally. In other words, educational programmes and approaches must be purposefully designed to foster the development of individuals' intercultural communicative competence (ICC) -discussed by Byram (1997); Risager (2011)-which consists of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and critical awareness. One of these approaches is CLIL (acronym for Content and Language Integrated Learning), defined by Marsh (2002, p. 15) as "any dual-focused educational context in which an additional language, thus not usually the first foreign language of the learners involved, is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of non-language content".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Intercultural Learning through CLIL

Parra¹

2020

J. New Approaches Educ. Res.

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CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) —endorsed by the European Commission since 1996— constitutes the official approach to bilingual education in Spain. Intercultural learning (IL) is one of the four defining Cs in CLIL, though the literature has consistently described it as the weakest implementation area. This paper analyses the opinions of 76 Spanish secondary education students about IL through their bilingual curriculum. Their viewpoints clearly suggest that IL comes from two main sources: native assistants; and exchange programmes. These data were contrasted with the views of school principals and bilingual coordinators, who declared that both of these valuable ‘resources’ for IL are scarce due to administrative difficulties and lack of budget. Our conclusions reveal how improving these areas can lead not only to improved scores but also to a better implementation of the intercultural axis in CLIL, if the goal consists in educating 21st century citizens.

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“…The last period, current trends in research since 2000, represents an almost exclusive attention to a “transnational or global/local approach, focusing on cultural complexity and hybridity” (Risager, , p. 485). The key words of this era are “critical citizenship” (Guilherme, , pp.…”

Section: Teaching Culture In the Efl Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks: A Semiotic Approach

2013

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This article problematizes current, quantitative approaches to the analysis of culture in foreign language textbooks as objectifying culture, and offers an alternative, semiotic framework that examines texts, images, and tasks as merely engendering particular meanings in the act of semiosis. The authors take as a point of departure developments within the social sciences that have questioned monolithic conceptualizations of culture as well as recent arguments that stress intercultural citizenship and global cultural consciousness as key goals of (foreign) language learning. The authors argue that such transformative pedagogic agendas require a more dynamic understanding of how culture figures in teaching materials and of the processes through which learners engage with those materials. Through excerpts from two English as a foreign language textbooks written by and for Hungarians, the authors illustrate a semiotic analytic approach that underscores two key insights: (1) that learners' meaning making in the classroom tends to be heavily guided and (2) that images and texts, even those with supposed cultural meaning or focus, seem to foster mainly linguistic competence. The article makes the case that images and texts should be harnessed more explicitly to develop a critical and reflexive understanding of culture, self, and other.

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The cultural dimensions of language teaching and learning

Cited by 48 publications

References 3 publications

Tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: The case of the IEREST project

Tracing intercultural and interlinguistic moves within and beyond student mobility programmes: The case of the IEREST project

Measuring Intercultural Learning through CLIL

Culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks: A Semiotic Approach

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