Week 7

Intercultural competence
Objectives
• Identify components of intercultural competence
• Knowledge
• Skills
• attitudes
• Identify strategies/methods to promote intercultural competence in
EIL
The components of ICC
Defining ICC: lead-in
• What do you think ICC is? Make a mindmap.
• Is there a perfect ICC?
• Watch a video and take notes.
ICC: a relative perspective
• it is not possible to acquire or to anticipate all the knowledge one
might need in interacting with people
• many other ever changing cultures
• Any language can be a lingua franca with anyone from any country.
• everyone's own social identities and values develop, everyone
acquires new ones throughout life as they become a member of new
social groups; and those identities, and the values, beliefs and
behaviours they symbolise are deeply embedded in one's self
• -> the need to adjust, to accept and to understand other people - it is never a
completed process.
Latent Variables and Indicators
1

3 Indicators
Latent Variable
4

6
Not directly
observable Directly observable

6
 ICC

3
ICC
4

6
A Bigger Idea
Knowledge, skills,
attitudes, values 7
ICC Knowledge
• social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in
one’s interlocutor’s country,
• the general processes of interaction to individuals and the society
Skills One’s own
culture
The other
cultures

beliefs beliefs

practices practices

• compare
• relate
• interpret
• Explain
• Discover
• interact
Skills
• Skills of interpreting and relating: ability to
• interpret a document or event from another culture,
• explain it
• relate it to documents or events from one’s own
• Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire):
• ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices
• use knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time
communication and interaction.
ICC Attitudes
• curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other
cultures and belief about one’s own
• a willingness to relativise one's own values, beliefs and behaviours,
• the ability to 'decentre'.
Critical cultural awareness
• the ability to evaluate critically the perspectives, practices and
products in one’s own and other cultures and countries
• Bloom taxonomy reminder
Discussion
• Please discuss and find examples for the key components of ICC
Quick check: Matching
Components Meaning
1. Knowledge A. Being able to discover, compare and contrast, interpret, relate
one’s own products and practices against others

2. Skills B. Being ready to de-centre and relativise one’s own products and
practices
3. Attitudes C. Being able to evaluate critically and empirically cultures

4. Values D. Being aware of the different groups in the society, of one’s own
and other’s products and practices, of the processes of
interaction to individuals and the society
Developing ICC: a teachers’ task

Knowledge

Skills attitudes

Critical Awareness
 2.1 ‘Compare the themes’

● Get learners compare the themes in familiar

contexts with examples from unfamiliar
contexts.
● Examples: the theme of sports can be
examined from many perspectives of
Photo credit: internations.org
gender, age, region, religion, races, etc.
 An intercultural and critical perspective
• Themes: schooling, food, sports
• Perspectives to add in different themes: warm-up or follow-up activities
Example: theme sports
• Gender – are there sports that are, in the familiar context or in the unfamiliar context, predominantly played by men or
by women? Are things changing?
• Age – are there sports for younger people and older people?
• Region – are there local sports? Do people identify with local teams? Do some teams have a particular cultural
tradition?
• Religion – are there religious objections to playing sport, or days when some people choose not to do sport because of
religious observance?
• Racism – is this found in spectator sports? are the players of foreign teams, or foreign players in local teams always
treated with respect? Are there incidents of racist chants or insults?
• Social classes/socio-economic status
• Family types
• Education backgrounds
• Jobs
Practice

Brainstorm different situations for the theme of

food under different perspectives:
- gender
- age
- region
Photo credit:
- religion newfoodmagazine.com
 2.2 ‘Challenge the stereotypes’

● Challenge the stereotypes in the books, from

images to statements.
● Examples: gender stereotypes in images and
statements (an image of a male pilot, a
female nurse, etc.)
Photo credit: indiatoday.in
● Learners can devise and swap further
exercises with different contexts.
Grammar exercises
• Contents of grammar exercises can be challenged on the stereotype
perspectives
• The grammar lesson of BC
• https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/grammar/a1-a2-grammar
2.3 ‘Use authentic materials’
It is important to use authentic material but
to ensure that learners understand its
context and intention. Materials from
different origins with different
perspectives should be used together to
enable learners to compare and to
analyse the materials critically. It is more
important that learners acquire skills of
analysis than factual information.

Photo credit: Cambridge.org

Materials
• Authentic texts
• Containing contrasting views
• Asking learners to relate and compare, analyze the contexts and
intentions
Discussion
• In your scenario for assignment 2, which perspectives can be included
to make the materials and themes of the lesson more inter-cultural?
Teaching pragmatics in ICC
Input processing approach (Takimoto, 2009
and 2012).
• (1) listen to a dialog with several examples of the target pragmatic structure
• (2) work in small groups or pairs and examine the appropriateness of the target
structure, evaluating both the linguistic forms and social context in which they
occur,
• (3) analyze additional texts receptively
• (4) complete productive tasks, such as discourse completion, role-playing, or
judgment tasks to determine the appropriateness of examples provided
• (5)Follow-up tasks can be either the same as the input task or similar to it
(repetition can be better)
 Implicit and explicit instructions
Implicit instruction
• Improves spontaneous
pragmatic production (Koike
& Pearson, 2005)
• Can be used to taught
similar pragmatic concepts
in L1 and L2.
Explicit instruction
● Improves explicit knowledge (rules) (Koike &
Pearson, 2005)
● Leads to long-term gains (Alcon Soler, 2008)
● Can be used to taught more complex pragmatic
concepts or ones different from users’ L1 – e.g.
expressing agreement/ disagreement, giving
constructive feedback)
● Sample tasks: mapping form to function, enhancing
input, etc.
Skill-focused approach
• repeated practice of rules via tasks that foster receptive as well as productive skills (Li,
2012).
• Sample dialogs, discourse completion tasks and multiple-choice activities are used to
model the use of speech acts in particular speech events and social contexts (Ishida,
2009).
• Martínez-Flor and Usó-Juan (2006): a six-stage framework using comparative analysis
between cultures
• researching and reflecting: introducing pragmatic concepts in their L1 (e.g., speech acts or
politeness formulae), analyzing the data according to gender or age, as well as other social
variables.
• receiving and reasoning: giving explicit instruction about how the speech acts or politeness
formulae are expressed in the L2
• rehearsing and revising: repetitive practicing and receiving feedback.
researching and receiving and rehearsing and
reflecting reasoning revising
Task-based training of pragmatics
• prioritize socially situated meaningful language use.
• Can be used with technology: classes across borders
• Which ICC and pragmatic knowledge?
• Which language to learn?
• Which technology to use?
Discussion: Which approaches
are used in the sampled
activities?
General implications about teaching pragmatics
• Teaching young learner is possible and useful (Abrams, 2014; Dewaele, 2008).
• longer authentic materials (e.g., a television series, documentary, novel) can be good
(modeling dyadic and multi-participant interactions, with messy turn-taking patterns, false
starts, interruptions, and discontinuities, along with numerous cultural references)
(Abrams, 2016b; Gilmore, 2015).
• authentic materials are good (many different types of spoken, written, and signed
language –> “sensitise learners to the ways in which the discourse reflects its context”
(Gilmore, 2015, p. 103).
• tasks should prompt learners to interpret the social meaning of interactions and allow
them to identify and adopt appropriate participant roles, reflecting learners’ needs for
genuine interpersonal exchanges in which they may have to participate in real, authentic
communication (DeBot, Verspoor, & Verspoor, 2005; Eisenchlas, 2011; Seedhouse, 1996).
• Teaching needs to move away from native-speakerism (Martínez-Flor & Fukuya, 2005).
Watch a video on ICC and take notes of
implications for teaching EIL