Intercultural Language Activities

Abstract

Intercultural learning and teaching has become a buzzword in the last ten years. The global spread of English and its increasingly important role as a lingua franca have also had an impact on traditional points of reference in terms of which cultural representations should be included in ELT. Lingua franca studies (for example Seidlhofer 2004; Seidlhofer, Breiteneder, and Pitzl 2006) and challenges to the native speaker as a model of reference have questioned whether cultural representations should include larger views and settings than Anglophone countries only, in order to cater for realistic and relevant contexts of use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and of varieties of Englishes around the world. Also relevant is Kramsch's (1993) notion of a third place of meaning, which can be developed in encounters with other cultures through an involvement of the learner's self in exploring cultural borders, in discovering and making sense of new cultural aspects and spaces to be accommodated cognitively and emotionally. Reflecting on and relativizing the home culture (C1) for learners is also a fundamental point in the process of becoming an intercultural speaker, which can be of particular relevance in the increasingly multilingual and multicultural educational contexts of classrooms. The notion of Intercultural Communicative Competence, which has developed since the 1990s (Byram 1997; Corbett 2003; Risager 2007), sets itself in this changing scenario as one of the main objectives for language teaching, i.e. fostering the ability to use language in order to communicate with people from diverse language and cultural backgrounds.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.