See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/318581689

Intercultural citizenship in the (foreign) language classroom

Article  in  Language Teaching Research · July 2017

DOI: 10.1177/1362168817718580

CITATIONS READS

14 1,980

3 authors, including:

Stephanie Houghton Michael Byram

Saga University Durham University
22 PUBLICATIONS   197 CITATIONS    101 PUBLICATIONS   5,078 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Council of Europe project View project

Globalisation of language education policy View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Stephanie Houghton on 25 January 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

718580
research-article2017
LTR0010.1177/1362168817718580Language Teaching ResearchPorto et al.

LANGUAGE
TEACHING
Guest editorial RESEARCH

Language Teaching Research

Intercultural citizenship in the

1­–15
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
(foreign) language classroom sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362168817718580
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168817718580
journals.sagepub.com/home/ltr

Melina Porto
Universidad Nacional de La Plata and CONICET, Argentina

Stephanie Ann Houghton

Saga University, Japan

Michael Byram
University of Durham, UK

Abstract
The purpose of this special issue is to bring the theory of intercultural citizenship education to
readers’ attention and to offer teachers and researchers working with this or similar concepts
the opportunity to make their work known in a context of a coherent presentation of theory
and practice. In this introduction, we shall explain the rationale and the concepts involved in
intercultural citizenship education and present the articles in this special issue which arose from
our call for papers.

Keywords
civic engagement, criticality, duties and responsibilities of language education, intercultural
citizenship education, instrumental and educational perspectives

I Introduction
In early 2015 we proposed a special issue on ‘intercultural citizenship in the language
classroom’ to the editors of Language Teaching Research because we believe that lan-
guage teaching, whether referred to as ‘foreign’, ‘second’ or more recently ‘world’ lan-
guage teaching, has an educational as well as an instrumental purpose. The central point

Corresponding author:
Melina Porto, Universidad Nacional de La Plata and CONICET, La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Email: M.Porto@uea.ac.uk; melinaporto@conicet.gov.ar
2 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

is that language teaching can and should contribute to educational processes, to the
development of individuals and to the evolution of societies.
Citizenship education is one realization of this educational dimension across the
whole curriculum, but we suggest that foreign language education can make a specific
contribution to citizenship education through the concept of ‘intercultural citizenship
education’ (ICE) because ICE provides a perspective which breaks through the national-
ism of most citizenship education. This is all the more important in the new era of jingo-
ism that dominates current political and world affairs.
The purpose of our suggestion for a special issue to the editors of Language Teaching
Research was to bring the theory of ICE to readers’ attention and to offer teachers and
researchers working with this or similar concepts the opportunity to make their work
known in a context of a coherent presentation of theory and practice. In fact we had a
good number of offers of papers, which seems to indicate that there is an interest in the
topic that had not hitherto been met. In this introduction, we shall then explain the ration-
ale and the concepts involved in ICE and present the articles in this special issue which
arose from our call for papers.

II  Intercultural citizenship education

Intercultural citizenship education acknowledges the instrumental value of learning one
or more languages but crucially focuses on its educational worth and potential. It is a
development in which the role of foreign language education in citizenship and political
and moral education is seen as an extension of the scope of citizenship education.
Education for citizenship is a development from traditions of ‘civic education’ (Osler &
Starkey, 2010).
Starting from the assumption that ‘language teaching as foreign language education
cannot and should not avoid educational and political duties and responsibilities’ (Byram,
2001, p. 102), Byram (2008, 2014) frames these educational and political duties in the
concept of ‘education for intercultural citizenship in the foreign language classroom’.
The concept demonstrates the complementarity of foreign language education with its
emphasis on intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997; Liddicoat &
Scarino, 2013) and citizenship education with its emphasis on civic action in the com-
munity. This integration of language and citizenship education is summarized from the
language teaching perspective as follows:

the content in question [of foreign language education] should draw on citizenship education,
enriching it with attention to intercultural communicative competence and giving substantial
and meaningful content to language lessons, while providing opportunities for methodological
innovation and cross-curricular cooperation. The acquisition of intercultural citizenship
competences would be the aims and objectives realizing both educational and instrumental/
functional purposes. (Byram, 2010, p. 318)

The argument is that, when (foreign/second/world) language teaching takes into con-
sideration its educational function as well as its instrumental purposes, its aims begin to
coincide with some of the aims of contemporary citizenship education. In the most recent
Porto et al. 3

Table 1.  Intercultural Citizenship in the Language Classroom.

Foreign language education which develops intercultural communicative competence includes:
•• criticality/critical cultural awareness;
•• a focus on ‘others’ who live beyond our national boundaries and speak another language;
•• comparative analysis of our situation and theirs.
It does NOT include ‘service to the community’ as citizenship education does.
Citizenship education includes (not only):
•• teaching which leads to activity/service to the community in the here and now;
•• a focus on ‘community’ as local, regional, national but not international/transnational.
It does NOT include criticality/critical cultural awareness towards ‘our’ community.
Filling the ‘gaps’ in language education with the elements of citizenship education cited here –
and vice versa – creates a new concept of ‘intercultural citizenship education’.

Source. Based on Byram, Golubeva, Han & Wagner (2017, p. xxiii)

manifestation of this work, Byram, Golubeva, Han and Wagner (2017) propose that the
integration of language education and citizenship education can occur by combining the
relational (focus on ‘others’), transnational and critical perspectives of foreign language
education with the civic action in the community component of citizenship education
(see Table 1).
The combination of elements from both language and citizenship education is how-
ever not simple. It brings its own complexities, including matters of criticality, native-
speakerism (especially when English is the language taught), the intercultural speaker,
nation-state loyalty, internationalism and action in the community.

1  Criticality
In a model of ‘intercultural communicative competence’, Byram (1997) emphasized the
significance of ‘critical cultural awareness’: ‘an ability to evaluate critically and on the
basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cul-
tures and countries’ (p. 53). The development of criticality has been taken up by others
(e.g. Byram & Guilherme, 2000), and Houghton (2012) argues that criticality triggers
and helps to manage personal and social transformation through intercultural dialogue.
In this perspective, ‘transformation’ is a process of conscious and deliberate personal and
social transformation flowing from the critical exploration, analysis and evaluation of
self and other. It becomes central in intercultural citizenship education where critical
thought is realized in action which may involve both the critical self-reflection and the
refashioning of national views and traditions which Barnett (1997) refers to as ‘trans-
formatory critique’ or ‘critique in action’.
In practice, Byram et al. (2017) suggest that intercultural citizenship experience in the
(foreign) language classroom occurs when students in one country (or one cultural
group):

•• create a sense of transnational identification with learners in another country (or

another cultural group) in a transnational project;
4 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

•• challenge the common sense of each national group within the transnational
project;
•• develop a new transnational way of thinking and acting (a new way which may be
either a modification of what is usually done or a radically new way); and
•• reach high levels of criticality that involve not only critical skills and reflexivity
but also a ‘refashioning of traditions’ (Barnett, 1997) through critical and commit-
ted civic action in the community.

2  Native-speakerism
Citizenship education and interculturally-oriented language education both share an
interest in developing learners’ competences in analysis, cooperation and knowledge-
development about societies and the socio-political environment, which includes becom-
ing active agents in the world. Competence in languages is important as a condition for
interaction with others and, in the teaching of English in particular, the traditional notion
of using the native speaker as a model for learners to strive after, has been challenged in
a post-native-speakerist approach to language education. Such an approach necessitates
an informed rejection of the native-speaker not only as the socio-cultural model but also
as the linguistic model for learners of English. Native-speakerism has been widely dis-
cussed and rejected in relation to English language teaching, especially in the fields of
World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca, and also through Holliday’s (2005) and
Houghton and Rivers’ (2013) conceptualizations of the problems, which view various
associated problems rooted in prejudice and discrimination from the standpoints of both
‘native’ and ‘non-native-speakers’, in different teaching contexts and cultures. However,
native-speakerism is not limited to the teaching of English as a foreign language. It has
also been found in the teaching of other languages, including French (Chevalier, 2012),
Japanese (Hashimoto, 2013) and the endangered language of Guernesias on the island of
Guernsey (Houghton, Rivers and Hashimoto, forthcoming). Derivry-Plard summarizes
the general view as follows:

Language teachers as professionals have to get rid of such essentialist, reductive images of
identities, in order to think of their professional language teaching field as a truly intercultural
communicative space where binary oppositions like native/non-native, exclusion/inclusion
should be overcome. (Derivry-Plard, 2013, p. 255)

3  The intercultural speaker

Foreign language education turns learners’ attention to otherness, to groups of people –
whether whole nations or smaller social groups – who speak the language being learnt
and this goes beyond the focus on ‘us’ and ‘our state’. The development of intercultural
communication skills is vital as people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds
interact and engage in ‘the intercultural negotiation of agency and power in the translocal
spaces of contemporary globalization’ (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 222). This focus on ‘oth-
ers’ in language education in general, i.e. the relational aspect involved, is not new
(Kramsch,1998) and is encompassed in the notion of the intercultural speaker or intercul-
tural mediator (Byram, 2009; Houghton, 2009).
Porto et al. 5

The intercultural speaker is inter alia someone who can ‘read’ texts of all kinds – lin-
guistic and non-linguistic, spoken, written, visual, digital, and multimodal for instance
– in a critical and comparative mode, analysing their meaning in their context but also
knows how they can be interpreted from another context, sometimes resolving conflict-
ing misunderstandings in the process. The intercultural speaker or mediator is transling-
ual, cosmopolitan, consensus-oriented, supportive and open to negotiation, i.e. they
negotiate meanings with others on equal terms departing from their own positionalities.

4  Nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism

Myers argues that ‘a major barrier to GCE [global citizenship education] remains the
traditional master narrative of schooling to develop patriotic citizens loyal to the nation
state’ (Myers, 2016, p. 9). The notion of the intercultural speaker or mediator challenges
this national basis of citizenship education, because, as Starkey (2011) and Osler and
Starkey (2010) argue, language education invites a reconsideration of identities, and con-
sequently language learning challenges the notion that citizenship is associated primarily
with monolithic national identities. This in turn means that citizenship and language
education combined has the potential to promote a cosmopolitan perspective including a
commitment to universal human rights. Osler and Starkey (2010) define the processes
whereby learners situate themselves as citizens of the world as ‘education for cosmopoli-
tan citizenship’, in contrast to models of national citizenship.
The distinction between cosmopolitanism and internationalism/transnationalism is
complex and offers further refinement of ICE. Osler (2015b) argues that the universality
that a human rights framework presupposes is in tension with predominant traditions of
foreign/second language education based on international understanding rather than cos-
mopolitanism. International understanding privileges national over cosmopolitan per-
spectives, and reinforces a sense that there are barriers to be overcome in relations
between people from different nation-states. By contrast, education for cosmopolitan
citizenship emphasizes the reality of complex and multiple identities, and allows a space
for the exploration of identity in the context of citizenship. When this articulates with
language education policy, language learners may be emancipated from their ascribed
roles as national ambassadors. The experience is no longer framed as ‘international’ but
rather as a personal exploration of intercultural perspectives.

5  Action in the community

The theoretical demand that ICE should lead to activities which change the individual
and ‘re-fashion traditions’, has been operationalized in the phrase ‘action in the commu-
nity’, and Houghton (2012), Houghton and Yamada (2012), Porto (2014, 2016, 2017),
Porto and Byram (2015) and Byram et al. (2017) present accounts of work in classrooms
which illustrate this concept. The cases reported in this body of work are taken from 11
countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia (Argentina, China, Denmark, Hungary, Italy,
Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, USA). The projects link groups of learners in
two or three countries around a topic of social import that they explore in a comparative
methodology, through interaction across the internet, where foreign languages are used
6 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

in interaction, sometimes with English as the lingua franca. As a consequence of their

cooperation, learners analyse an issue in their own society with the help of their partners
from another country, thus acquiring an international or cosmopolitan perspective. This
becomes the basis for some civic action in their own socio-political milieu, action
through which they try to bring change – usually on a very small but nonetheless signifi-
cant scale – in the world they inhabit.
This approach can be usefully compared with (intercultural) service learning
(Rauschert and Byram, 2017), and we shall see below how this relationship has been the
basis for work in one of the articles in this special issue.

III  The articles in this special issue

The articles in this special issue address the matters of criticality, native-speakerism, the
intercultural speaker, nation-state loyalty, internationalism and action in the community
which are part of ICE. Three describe pedagogic projects, three deal with teacher educa-
tion, one addresses the question of ELF in study abroad and yet another one presents an
analysis of textbooks relevant to this issue.
Drawing explicitly on the principles of ICE, Yulita uses the model of competences for
democratic culture, recently developed by the Council of Europe (Barrett, 2016) and the
United Nations’ declaration on human rights education and training (UN Human Rights
Council, 2011) to test the potential of intercultural citizenship projects conceptualized as
in Byram et al. (2017) to develop human rights goals in foreign language teaching. She
describes a pedagogic project involving Argentinian and UK-based higher education stu-
dents – the international or transnational element – in foreign language classrooms who
met in Skype to discuss the Argentinian military dictatorship and its manipulation of the
1978 Football World Cup. Criticality was central as students acted as intercultural speak-
ers and mediators when they designed a collaborative leaflet intended to raise awareness
of this highly disturbing human rights issue in society. In this way, they became engaged
with their communities (the civic or social action element in ICE) and developed their
democratic competences.
Also placing the international/transnational, critical and action in the community ele-
ments of ICE at the front, Wu describes an international service-learning (ISL) experience
involving Taiwanese non-native English speakers during a two-week trip to a poor com-
munity in the Philippines. The author shows that the ISL program catered for the develop-
ment of the intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes of these volunteers and, most
importantly, that ISL was more than a form of community service as it became a trans-
formative learning experience for all participants. Interestingly, despite the rejection of
the native-speaker in much of the literature, as we saw above, Wu argues that her study
makes a contribution by adding to the literature on international service-learning precisely
because students engaged in service learning with hosts who were also non-native English
speakers, instead of following the tradition of study abroad in countries where English is
spoken natively. However, viewed from within the literature on native-speakerism referred
to above, the social categories of ‘native’ and ‘non-native-speaker’ as used in Wu’s study
can themselves be categorized as ‘zombie’ categories, as described below:
Porto et al. 7

although multiculturalism and multilingualism have become common, the categories with
which culture, language and identity are described often obscure these complexities of social
reality. Categories like cultures, nations or languages, categories that describe the world as
materializing in static, bounded systems, draw an overly simple picture. Yet they are still
relevant for describing social life. It would be difficult to give an account of multicultural
identity … without making reference to the concepts that are put into question through the
existence of such identities. The notion of a ‘zombie category’ (Beck, 2001) illustrates this
paradoxical situation. Zombies are creatures that are dead and alive at the same time (Schneider,
2014, p. 1).

In a project that aims to prepare elementary readers to be critical intercultural citizens

through literacy education, Huh and Suh integrate critical intercultural citizenship into
existing approaches to civic and English as a foreign language literacy education to equip
elementary students in South Korea with literacy and communication skills to help them
become citizens who can connect with others in intercultural domains. The central
research question explores how teacher pedagogy in the intercultural citizenship curricu-
lum can help students become more intercultural and caring citizens. Having analysed
discussion about 11 graphic novels, they suggest that:

critical citizenship literacy skills can be developed with teacher pedagogy that help students
reflect on the cultural knowledge and practices that seem natural to them. The pedagogies of
dialoguing, active consideration of missing perspectives and direct juxtaposition of students’
own and others’ social contexts are unpacked to suggest ways of incorporating intercultural
citizenship education into literacy education.

However, the line that separates what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the classroom may not be
easy to delineate in practice. While the activities described in this article prepare learners
to engage in the world outside the classroom in terms of mental preparation and aware-
ness-raising of social issues, the paper raises the important question of whether the dis-
cussions themselves constitute ‘action in the world’.
In their article, Krulatz, Steen-Olsen and Torgersen describe a project conceived
within the Norwegian response to the increasing diversity of young people in schools
and the need for teachers to be prepared for that diversity. The emphasis is on the rights
of immigrants to Norway to receive respect for their cultures and religions whilst empha-
sizing the importance of their participation as citizens in the Norwegian society. The
authors are academics and wished to cooperate with schools and particularly with lan-
guage teachers. It is noteworthy that when asked what help they needed the emphasis
was on rather general requests for help in methodology, and the efforts of the teacher
educators included ensuring more precision in defining needs and aims. They adapted an
approach to ‘identity texts’ pioneered in Canada, which encourages young people of
diverse origins to use all their languages, including those of the home, to create texts and
use them in their engagement with their community – in the school and beyond. The
teachers found themselves breaking through the boundaries of their subjects and design-
ing cross-curricular projects. The authors conclude that the project was not entirely suc-
cessful but provided a foundation for working with other concepts and methods; changing
teachers’ and learners’ established concepts of language learning is an incremental task.
8 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

In her article about teacher education, Sharkey also raises the question of how teach-
ers with little experience of diversity in their classrooms – and being as a group them-
selves rather homogeneous – can be helped to respond to new demands coming from
migration. She describes her analysis of exiting work within a large-scale teacher educa-
tion project to analyse what teachers were doing, and uses Byram’s (1997) model as a
basis. Finding that there was a lack of perspective taking, collaborative planning, and/or
critical analysis in the projects teachers planned, i.e. that there was little to explicitly
encourage the development of intercultural citizenship or intercultural experiences, she
re-designed the course for teachers. More particularly, she ensured that teachers would
design work that included an ‘advocacy project: action in/with the community’ to attempt
to help teachers bridge the gap between the classroom and the community. This was not
always successful as some teachers were reluctant to do so, and Sharkey argues that
future work needs to find ways in which teachers will see themselves as ‘citizens and
community members instead of or in addition to as teachers’.
The article by Palpacuer-Lee, Hutchison Curtis and Curran explores the potential of
service-learning in a US context, where pre-service language teachers and linguistically
diverse families met weekly in a ‘conversation café’ as part of an English-focused ser-
vice-learning project. Here there is no international element, but one axiom in ICE is that
different social groups in the same country can also be put together as was the case in this
study. The action in the community element stands out as families, supported by the pre-
service language teachers, designed a booklet called ‘Advice for parents’ intended to
provide useful and insider advice and recommendations to newcomers to the USA.
Echoing the article by Chiu-Hui Wu, the service-learning experience became a trans-
formative encounter for everyone involved, with criticality at the core as both teachers
and parents engaged in intercultural mediation practises through acts of (de)centring,
comparison, care and celebration.
Fang and Baker endorse the view that English is no longer the sole property of its
Anglophone native English speakers (NES). They claim that the current dominance of
Anglophone cultures and NES in the field of English language teaching should be prob-
lematized within an intercultural citizenship education framework that offers a critical
alternative model in language education. To that end, they explored the integration of
English as a lingua franca (ELF), intercultural approaches and the concept of intercul-
tural citizenship in English language teaching (ELT) at a university in southeast China
where there are many ELT learners and high degrees of student mobility. They highlight
the need for the development of more in-depth and critical approaches to language, cul-
ture and intercultural communication teaching in ELT that foster and cultivate students’
sense of intercultural citizenship. While students’ understanding and experience of inter-
cultural communication and citizenship was gained outside the classroom during study
abroad, classroom instruction itself offered only limited channels to gain experience and
develop understanding, although many students spoke positively about aspects of it and
recognized the importance of English in the development of intercultural connections
and citizenship.
Finally, taking a traditional approach to critical literacy focusing on textbook analysis,
Uzum, Yazam and Selvi report on a project that explores both inclusive and exclusive
uses of first person plural pronouns in textbooks, which in itself demonstrates critical
Porto et al. 9

literacy. Analysing four American multicultural teacher education textbooks using posi-
tioning theory as a theoretical framework, they examine the textbook authors’ uses of
first person plural pronouns to understand how these pronouns perform reflexive and
interactive positioning, and fluidly (re)negotiate and (re)delineate the borders between
‘self’ and ‘other’ in the process. They conclude that ‘language teachers should use criti-
cality and reflexivity when approaching exclusionary discourses and representations that
neglect the particularities of individuals from different cultures.’

IV  Researching intercultural citizenship in the (foreign)

language classroom
Empirical research on ICE reported in the literature tends to be based on qualitative data
and be interpretative in nature (e.g. Byram et al., 2017; Porto, 2014, 2016, 2017; Porto &
Byram, 2015). Furthermore, action research is often present, perhaps because of the
desire of many teacher-researchers to pursue curriculum development through research.
The question of the purpose of research is thus crucial in deciding on the methods to be
used and the nature of the data that will be collected. In addition to, or instead of, research
which seeks to understand a phenomenon from the perspective of those involved, or
research that seeks to develop and advocate a particular approach to teaching, a third
general category is the research that explores causal relationships among factors or vari-
ables in the teaching situation. In research that seeks to understand or advocate, qualita-
tive data are usually most frequent, although quantitative data may also be useful, and
vice versa in research that is explanatory (Byram and Feng, 2005). The design of research
depends very much on the purpose. Participatory research where teachers and students
are involved in data collection is, for example, one approach to heuristic research,
whereas experimental design is most frequently associated with exploratory research.
For example, experimental design could be used to test the effects of involvement in ICE
on learners’ political activities. Does such involvement make them more likely to vote
and/or become involved in other kinds of activity?
Osler and Starkey (2010) offer an approach to participatory and biographical methods
and narrative research. Their rationale begins with the idea that when students enter the
classroom they do so in specific global locations, and with specific positionings in histo-
ries that privilege or repress their voices. As an ascribed identity is not chosen by the
individual, but designated often by powerful others (teachers, education policy-makers,
etc.), it is important to allow students ‘the right to narrate’. Telling their stories protects
democratic practice by creating a classroom in which students have equitable access to
learning and in which they are not dehumanized by having to accept ascribed identities.
In this special issue, we predominantly find case studies with qualitative data and an
interpretative outlook. Data types include internet-mediated communication in the form
of Skype conversations amongst students (Yulita), student reflections, interviews, and
public presentations (Wu), student discussion (Huh and Suh), student products and
teacher surveys (Krulatz, Steen-Olsen and Torgersen), reflective journals by pre-service
language teachers and a collaborative (parents–teachers) booklet of advice for parents
(Palpacuer-Lee, Hutchison Curtis and Curran), interviews with students (Fang and
Baker), and documents (teacher education projects in Sharkey and textbooks in Uzum,
10 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

Yazan and Selvi). The design and methods include case study (Fang and Baker; Yulita;
Palpacuer-Lee, Hutchison Curtis and Curran), action research (Huh and Suh; Krulatz,
Steen-Olsen and Torgersen; Chiu-Hui Wu), and content/discourse analysis (Sharkey;
Uzum, Yazan and Selvi).

V  Teacher education
Teaching for citizenship and human rights is a difficult task that encompasses three
dimensions:

education about rights (knowledge, values, human rights mechanisms), education in or through
rights (school ethos, educational structures, learning in a way which respects the rights of
learners and teachers), and education for rights (including skills for engaging in struggle and
transformation). (Osler, 2015a, p. 20; author’s emphasis)

There are several challenges and one is that ‘teachers have little experience or under-
standing of the ways in which human rights legal instruments might support their goals
in education for human rights (Osler & Starkey, 1996, p. 133). Teachers also lack support
in policy documents, curricula, syllabi, textbooks and materials to teach for citizenship
and human rights and have difficulty engaging in relevant practices within schools and
communities.
Another challenge is the existence of a strong national and often nationalistic basis of
schooling systems (Alviar-Martin & Baildon, 2016; Myers, 2016), which encourage loy-
alty first and foremost to the nation, rather than to humankind. In certain circumstances,
schools not only fail to promote justice and peace but actually encourage suspicion of the
other, ethnic superiority, hostility and violence.
Other challenges include authoritarian school cultures that tend not to fully acknowl-
edge the human rights of children and young people, or family and cultural values in stu-
dents’ homes that appear to be incompatible with human rights and democratic citizenship
principles. In this case, the principles on which education for citizenship and human rights
rest may be inoperable (Phipps, 2014). Furthermore, in some countries the problem for
teachers is that they are employees of the state and have made a pledge to be loyal to the
state; this is a moral dilemma that teacher education should help them to address.
Three of the articles in this special issue – one from Norway and two from the USA
– show how important the question of teacher identity is. Teachers of language for exam-
ple need to review their exclusive focus on language and work with others across the
curriculum, and they also need to consider if and how they identify with their community
as active citizens as well as being teachers. Teacher education is not simply a matter of
pedagogy and knowledge of matters such as human rights; as a process of socialization,
teacher education has to take a more complex perspective.

VI  Conclusions and future directions

We have attempted in this special issue to make the concept of ICE more widely known
by collecting work from around the world. An analysis of publications in language
Porto et al. 11

teaching research journals that we undertook before proposing our special issue showed
almost no interest at all in intercultural matters related to citizenship. The intercultural
citizenship dimension of language education is thus innovative, and this special issue
captures contexts in a range of regions of the world, not only those from which much
academic writing usually comes, which show how intercultural citizenship is under-
stood, lived and practised in widely differing settings. Some of these settings are local
and ‘peripheral’ (Canagarajah & Said, 2011) where ‘peripheral’ acquires a particular
significance because of the geographical location of the reported country in the world
map. This is the case of the Argentine, Chinese, Korean, Norwegian and Taiwanese set-
tings. Where research is contextualized in ‘central’ countries such as the UK and the
USA, the authors have provided local complementary perspectives.
There remain problems and potentials for future development. One important issue is
the question of universality. ICE proponents, both theorists and practitioners, have tended
to work within a human rights perspective with an assumption that human rights are
universal. However, it can be argued (e.g. Alviar-Martin & Baildon, 2016; Houghton,
2012; Osler 2015b) that citizenship and human rights, together with the values that tend
to be associated with them such as democracy, freedom, equality, respect for diversity,
and openness of mind, may be defined and interpreted differently across cultural, lin-
guistic and religious contexts. This means that the use of a human rights framework in
education can also be questioned. Furthermore, even within a human rights perspective,
there are also conflicting rights such as valuing human rights and cultural diversity when
cultural diversity undermines the rights of others (Barrett, 2016). Osler suggests that the
guideline should be that ‘rights need to be applied within a cultural context, but the broad
human rights principles of justice and equality should prevail’ (Osler, 2015b, p. 262).
This special issue makes a contribution in this respect. Presenting a range of contexts
and countries, it begins to test the wider applications of ICE based on an assumption of
universality. What is needed in the future is further nuanced analysis of the theory and its
underlying human rights principles as well as more discussion about the ethical, theoreti-
cal, practical and other issues involved in understanding, defining, researching and
teaching ICE. There is particular interest in the question of how ICE can be transferred
to other countries beyond those so far involved in this special issue and in other publica-
tions such as Byram et al. (2017).
Another specific area in need of further conceptual and empirical research is how
ICE is related to investigations of different kinds of engagement. Byram et al. (2017)
use Byram’s (2008) classification of political engagement to illustrate how as a result
of joint work in transnational groups, students engage in different forms of political
action. Levels 1 and 2 are ‘pre-political’, which means that students get involved with
others (through different types of text or in person using Skype) and reflect critically
on their own assumptions, and those of others. They also propose and imagine possible
alternatives and changes. Levels 3, 4 and 5 are political forms of engagement. Level 3
involves taking action to generate change in their own society and level 4 implies car-
rying out concrete civic actions. The highest form of political engagement in this clas-
sification is level 5, which means that students take action but as a transnational group.
Brunton-Smith and Barrett (2015, p. 195) suggest four categories of political and civic
participation:
12 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

voting; other forms of conventional political activity, such as contacting a politician, being a
member of/working for a political party …; non-conventional political activity, such as
participating in lawful demonstrations and illegal protests, buying/boycotting certain products
…; civic engagement, such as being involved in a social club, education or teaching group,
religious or church organization, cultural or hobby group, sports or outdoor activity club,
environmental or humanitarian organization, business or professional group or trade union.

Engagement in the digital realm also needs to be taken on board, rooted in but expand-
ing upon traditional approaches to critical literacy. The impact of new media on intercul-
tural communication deserves consideration (Chen, 2012), and ‘responsible, ethical, global
citizens for a digital world’ need to be cultivated through the development of educational
resources (Global Digital Citizen Foundation, n.d.). Cross-disciplinary dialogue between
educators in language and information technology is needed to synchronize terminology
and educational priorities. For example, while essential fluencies for global digital citizen-
ship described by the Global Digital Citizen Foundation (n.d.) may not on the surface
overtly describe and prioritize ‘critical citizenship literacy’ development reflecting differ-
ing underlying conceptual frameworks, more careful analysis of the key concepts may
suggest overlapping areas of concern that could be developed through inter-disciplinary
dialogue rooted in traditional approaches to traditional media, while embracing the new.
Critical citizenship literacy development, which is at the heart of ICE, thus refers to
‘expansive notions of literacy’ (Rowsell, 2017, p. 2), which in language education mean
developing the linguistic, digital, communicative and intercultural towards citizenship
capacities, which include criticality and imagination (Nussbaum, 2006) to empower stu-
dents to interact with, challenge and act in their communities.

Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the editors of Language Teaching Research for their continuous support dur-
ing the two-year process in which this special issue has developed. We also wish to thank the review-
ers who have contributed with their insights: Will Baker (University of Southampton, UK), Silvana
Barboni (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina), Claudia Borghetti (Università di Bologna,
Italy), Adriana Díaz (The University of Queensland, Australia), Manuela Guilherme (Universidade
de Coimbra, Portugal), Kayoko Hashimoto (The University of Queensland, Australia), Nobuyuki
Hino (Osaka University, Japan), Patrick Leong (University of Niigata Prefecture, Japan), Mario
López Barrios (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina), Ulla Lundgren (Jönköping University,
Sweden) and Lynne Parmenter (Waikato University, New Zealand).

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work has been funded by Porto’s and Houghton’s respective
universities.

References
Alviar-Martin, T., & Baildon, M.C. (2016). Context and curriculum in two global cities: A study of
discourses of citizenship in Hong Kong and Singapore. Education Policy Analysis Archives,
24(58), 1–31. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2140 (accessed July 2017).
Porto et al. 13

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. London: Open University Press.
Barrett, M. (2016). Competences for democratic culture. Living together as equals in culturally
diverse democratic societies. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Beck, U. (2001). Zombie categories: Interview with Ulrich Beck. In U. Beck , & E. Beck-
Gernsheim (Eds.), Individualization: Institutionalised individualization and its social and
political consequences (pp. 202–212). London: SAGE.
Brunton-Smith, I., & Barrett, M. (2015). Political and civic participation: Findings from the mod-
elling of existing survey data sets. In M. Barrett, & B. Zani (Eds.) Political and civic engage-
ment. Multidisciplinary perspectives. London: Routledge.
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Byram, M. (2001). Language teaching as a political action. In M. Bax, & J. Zwart (Eds.), Reflections
on language and language learning. In honour of Arthur van Essen (pp. 91–104) Amsterdam
/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship.
Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Byram, M. (2009). Intercultural competence in foreign languages. The intercultural speaker and
the pedagogy of foreign language education. In D. Deardorff (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of
intercultural competence (pp. 321–332) California: SAGE.
Byram, M. (2010). Linguistic and cultural education for Bildung and citizenship. Modern
Language Journal, 94, 318–321.
Byram, M. (2014). Twenty-five years on: From cultural studies to intercultural citizenship.
Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27, 209–225.
Byram, M., & Feng, A. (2005). Culture and language learning: teaching, research and scholarship.
Language Teaching, 37, 3 149–168.
Byram, M., & Guilherme, M. (2000). Human rights, cultures and language teaching. In A. Osler
(Ed.), Citizenship and democracy in schools: Diversity, identity, equality (pp. 63–78). Stoke-
on-Trent: Trentham Books.
Byram, M., Golubeva, I. Han, H., & Wagner, M. (Eds.) (2017). From principles to practice in
education for intercultural citizenship. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Canagarajah (2013). Agency and power in intercultural communication: Negotiating English in
translocal spaces. Language and Intercultural Communication, 13, 202–224.
Canagarajah, A.S., & Said, S.B. (2011). Linguistic imperialism. In J. Simpson (Ed.), The Routledge
handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 388–400). Abingdon: Routledge.
Chen, G.M. (2012). The impact of new media on intercultural communication. China Media
Research, 8, 1–10.
Chevalier, L. (2012). ‘Natifs’ vs ‘professeurs nationaux’: Analyse d’un discours ordinaire
[Natives’ vs. ‘national teachers’: Analysis of ordinary discourse], Revue japonaise de didac-
tique du francais, 1, 39–48.
Derivry-Plard, M. (2013). The native speaker language teacher: Through time and space. In S.A.
Houghton, & D.J. Rivers (Eds.), Native-speakerism in Japan: Intergroup dynamics in foreign
language education (pp. 159–168). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Global Digital Citizen Foundation (n.d.) The future is in our hands. Available at: https://global-
digitalcitizen.org/vision (accessed July 2017).
Hashimoto, K. (2013). The construction of the ‘native-speaker’ in Japan’s educational policies
for TEFL. In S.A. Houghton, & D.J. Rivers (Eds.) Native-speakerism in Japan: Intergroup
dynamics in foreign language education (pp. 243–255). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
14 Language Teaching Research 00(0)

Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Houghton, S. (2009). Intercultural mediation in the mono-lingual, mono-cultural foreign language
classroom: A case study in Japan. Cultus 2: Training and Competence, 117–132.
Houghton, S.A. (2012). Intercultural dialogue in practice: Managing value judgment in foreign
language education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Houghton, S., & Yamada, E. (2012). Developing criticality in practice through foreign language
education. Frankfurt Am Mein: Peter Lang.
Houghton, S.A., Rivers, D.J., & Hashimoto, K. (forthcoming) Beyond native-speakerism: Current
explorations and future visions. London: Routledge.
Houghton, S.A., & Rivers, D.J. (2013). Native-speakerism in Japan: Intergroup dynamics in for-
eign language education (pp. 243–255). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liddicoat, A., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester:
Wiley.
Myers, J.P. (2016). Charting a democratic course for global citizenship education: Research direc-
tions and current challenges. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24(55), 1–19. Available at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2174 (July 2017).
Nussbaum, M.C. (2006). Education and democratic citizenship: Capabilities and quality educa-
tion. Journal of Human Development, 7, 385–395.
Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (1996). Teacher education and human rights. London: David Fulton
Publishers.
Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (2010). Teachers and human rights education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham
Books.
Osler, A. (2015a). The stories we tell: Exploring narrative in education for justice and equality in
multicultural contexts. Multicultural Education Review, 7, 12–25.
Osler, A. (2015b). Human rights education, postcolonial scholarship, and action for social justice.
Theory and Research in Social Education, 43, 244–274.
Phipps, A. (2014). ‘They are bombing now’: ‘Intercultural Dialogue’ in times of conflict. Language
and Intercultural Communication, 1, 108–124.
Porto, M. (2014). Intercultural citizenship education in an EFL on-line project in Argentina.
Language and Intercultural Communication, 14, 245–261.
Porto, M. (2016). Ecological and intercultural citizenship in the primary English as a foreign lan-
guage (EFL) classroom: An online project in Argentina. Cambridge Journal of Education,
46, 395–415.
Porto, M. (2017). ‘Yo antes no reciclaba y esto me cambio por completo la consiencia’: Intercultural
citizenship education in the English classroom. Education 3–13, 45, 1–18.
Porto, M., & Byram, M. (2015). A curriculum for action in the community and intercultural citi-
zenship in Higher Education. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28, 226–242.
Rauschert, P., & Byram, M. (2017). Service Learning and Intercultural Citizenship in
Foreign Language Education. Cambridge Journal of Education. doi:10.1080/0305764X.
2017.1337722 .
Rowsell, J. (2017). Passing through: Reflecting on the journey through community arts zone.
Pedagogies: An International Journal, 12, 1–3.
Schneider, B. (2014). Salsa, language and transnationalism. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Porto et al. 15

Starkey, H. (2011). Language learning for human rights and democratic citizenship. In C. Ros
i Solé, & J. Fenoulhet (Eds.), Mobility and localisation in language learning: A view from
languages of the wider world (pp. 79–106). Oxford: Peter Lang.
UN Human Rights Council (2011). United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and
Training. Resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council, 8 April 2011, A/HRC/RES/16/1.
Available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/4db95b0a2.html (accessed July 2017).

View publication stats