Twenty-five years on – from cultural studies to intercultural citizenship

Abstract

At the editor's invitation this article was written as an analysis of the development of the intercultural dimension of foreign language teaching over the last 25 years. It is in part a personal reflection based on an article written for this journal 25 years ago, but it also draws on comments and insights from a network of researchers with whom the author has worked over much of the period in question.

Four areas are selected for comment: ‘the value of cultural studies’, ‘pedagogy and didactics’, ‘methodology’ and ‘assessment and evaluation’. It is argued that in the intervening period, the value of a cultural or intercultural dimension in language teaching has been widely recognised in policy documents and approaches to pedagogy developed. The picture with respect to methods of teaching for intercultural competence is mixed and the question of assessment remains insufficiently developed. Looking forward, the conclusion is that the most important area for development is in teacher education. There is still a lack of understanding among teachers with respect to the significance of intercultural competence and its relationship to linguistic competence.

Keywords:

• cultural studies
• intercultural competence
• teaching methods
• language teaching policy

Notes

1. I am grateful to Leah Davcheva, Irina Golubeva, Yannan Guo, Jing Mei Han, Stephanie Houghton, Ildikó Lázár, Ulla Lundgren, Melina Porto, Shuoqian Qin, Gertrud Tarp, Jessica Yau Tsai, Lone Svarstad, and Heather Richards and Clare Conway. I am also grateful to Paula Garrett-Rucks for information about ‘world languages’ teaching in the USA. They sent me detailed comments on more than one occasion and their views will be cited in the text by reference to their name.

2. As a Head of Languages in a secondary comprehensive school in the 1970s, I saw that other teachers thought of language teaching as having solely an instrumental purpose and as being of little educational value or even instrumental use for speakers of English. I had to defend the teaching of languages and especially the teaching of a second foreign language. I wrote a paper distributed to the whole staff – now long lost – in which I made the educational (but not yet the political) argument in ways which were further developed in the 1980s.

3. Although this article is not focused on my model from Byram (1997a), this is an opportune point to say that Houghton and others have critiqued that model and developed it further, that others have pointed out its weaknesses, and that, frustrated as a Ph.D. examiner to see students quoting the model without critiquing it, I produced a document circulated to Cultnet which gives a summary of such work to encourage them and their students to be more critical. This remains an informal document which I distribute where appropriate.

4. A current project of the Council of Europe, ‘Competences for Democratic Culture and Intercultural Dialogue’, is, some two decades later, attempting to produce scalable descriptors of intercultural (and democratic) competences.

5. There is some hope that a new site might be found for the materials perhaps at the University of Warwick (Anne Davidson-Lund, personal communication, 14 July 2014).