The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: the acquisition of a new professional identity

Abstract

It has now become commonplace to state that foreign language learning should be viewed in an intercultural perspective. The main objective of foreign language education is no longer defined strictly in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence. The aim of the study reported on here was to investigate to what extent and in what way teachers' current professional profiles meet the specifications formulated in the theoretical literature regarding the ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’. To answer this question, an international research design was developed, involving teachers from Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Mexico, Poland, Spain and Sweden. Our findings suggest that teachers' current foreign language‐and‐culture teaching profiles do not yet meet those of the envisaged ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’, and that patterns in teacher thinking and teaching practice appear to exist within and across the participating countries.

Notes

1. The questionnaire can be obtained through the author of this article.

2. The different researchers involved in this project collected the data on which this paper is based. The author of this article, who initiated and co‐coordinated the project, is much obliged to Ewa Bandura (Jagiellonian University, Poland), Paloma Castro (University of Valladolid, Spain), Leah Davcheva (The British Council, Bulgaria), Chryssa Laskaridou (University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Ulla Lundgren (Jönköping University, Sweden), María del Carmen Méndez García (University of Jaén, Spain) and Phyllis Ryan (UNAM: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico).

3. For reasons of space, no tables, substantiating the findings, have been included. Readers interested in receiving these tables and figures can contact the author.