32.2158, Review: Applied Linguistics: Byram (2020)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2158. Wed Jun 23 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2158, Review: Applied Linguistics: Byram (2020)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn, Lauren Perkins
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Nils Hjortnaes, Joshua Sims, Billy Dickson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2021 21:24:15
From: Boris Yelin [boris.yelin at gmail.com]
Subject: Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36702217


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-3787.html

AUTHOR: Michael  Byram
TITLE: Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence
SUBTITLE: Revisited
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Boris Yelin, Northeastern University

SUMMARY

According to the original (1997) preface, the proposed audience of ‘Teaching
and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence’ was “anyone interested
in foreign language teaching and learning, whatever the context in which they
live and work” (p. xvii), though primarily for language teachers. With the
‘Revisted’ edition, Byram’s aim was to incorporate developments from the past
twenty years, to respond to critiques of the first edition, and to take a more
critical (even political) stance with respect to intercultural communicative
competence (ICC). Consequently, this review may convince you that the ideal
audience is administrators of educational institutions, who often do not
understand the benefits of language education.

The book is primarily organized into an introduction, six chapters, a
conclusion, and an appendix. The main chapters are as follows: Chapter 1 –
Defining and Describing Intercultural Communicative Competence, Chapter 2 – A
Model for Intercultural Communicative Competence, Chapter 3 – Objectives for
Teaching, Learning and Assessment, Chapter 4 – Curriculum Issues, and Chapter
5 – Assessment.

In the introduction, Byram outlines and briefly touches on the foci of the
later chapter. Firstly, he describes the difficulties the average person faces
in terms of interacting with other cultures by presenting his dichotomy of
‘tourist’ vs. ‘sojourner,’ which are both proxies for shallow versus deep
interaction. He states that learners should adopt the attitudes of the latter.
This adoption of deep interaction is made difficult, he claims, because
pragmatic aspects of language, which are very important to communication in
any language, are often left out or reduced to disparate chunks of
information, such as formulaic phrases. Furthermore, he points out that it is
often difficult to assess these qualities in ways which are apparent to
educational institutions at large, which often have specific goals and
accountability measures.

>From the beginning, one can appreciate how the author has taken the time to
define his use of terms and respond to critiques from the past, especially
those related to defined meanings of terms. For example, he accepts that
foreign language teaching and second language teaching contexts are different
but puts forth that it is a difference of degree. Thus, he validates the
choice of not discussing them as separate but rather addressing topics in a
way that applies to both. In the endnotes to the introduction there are
explanations clearing up confusion between terms such as ‘evaluation’ and
‘assessment.’ He also responds to critiques, such as Baker’s (2015), claiming
that he focused on national cultures by explaining that what was understood
was an oversimplification, i.e., his assertions apply to the many communities
that exist in society within and between national borders. One concept that I
appreciate him referencing is ‘languaculture,’ (Agar, 1994) to describe in one
word what foreign language teaching conveys for the purpose of engaging in
ICC.

It is important to note that he did not intend the book to be a ‘model of
intercultural communication’ but rather a book for the teaching and learning
of intercultural communicative competence and emphasizes that ‘learners become
ethnographers rather than applied linguists’ (p. 9).

In Chapter 1, Byram dispels the notion that the ideal state for a second
language learner to reach is that of a native (first language) speaker. He
instead says that the goal should be an intercultural speaker. This involves
“the ability to see and manage relationships between themselves and their own
beliefs, values, behaviours and meanings, as expressed in a foreign language,
and those of their interlocutors, expressed in the same language– or even a
combination of languages– which may be the interlocutor’s native language, or
not” (p. 17). Two qualifications are that students cannot be expected to
achieve the deepest interactions at early ages, and perhaps there is a reason
to have some first language use to discuss matters of ICC when students still
have lower proficiency in the target language. Regardless of any
accommodations, he says that ‘we must not underestimate young people by
avoiding or over-simplifying a difficult topic”(p. 39). The takeaway message
is that preparing learners as intercultural speakers grants them the ability
to interact better with a variety of people even in their own culture and
society. Furthermore, they are able to look at both other cultures and their
own more critically. In this new addition, there is even more increased
emphasis on critical pedagogy and creating ‘Democratic Culture’ in the case of
the Council of Europe.

The combination of factors that he states are essential to cross-cultural
communication can be boiled down to the social aspect, the linguistic aspect,
and the task-oriented aspect. Furthermore, Byram criticizes models of
intercultural competence that assign very little importance to language
learning. One challenge he mentions is that there has long been a certain
reluctance by language instructors to teach a lot of culture due to the
limited time and the difficulty justifying increased emphasis when they often
have standardized testing that assesses purely the linguistic elements. Still,
he points out that there are more and more efforts to integrate ICC into the
communicative language curricula. He understands that this, however, involves
changing the way many still think about culture, i.e. as objects and practices
rather than the underlying influences and reasons why they exist.

Lastly, he notes that both an applied linguist perspective and an
ethnographic/anthropological one are necessary for language teaching and
learning. Consequently, Byram makes clear that ICC is not the sole
responsibility of foreign language education.

In Chapter 2, Byram discusses what would form a model for ICC. He points out
the possibility that it may not be merely a language that differentiates an
experience for people. For instance, he posits that two people with the same
first language but from different cultures may also need a high measure of
ICC. I would agree with this and add an example of someone setting me and a
British person to meet for lunch while we were both in Argentina. I asked what
the occasion might be, and I was told that it would be a nice opportunity to
meet someone else that shares my first language in a place where that was
rare. It turns out that we had a misunderstanding from the beginning of what
time to meet when I was told ‘half-three’ and was not sure whether that meant
3:30 p.m. or 2:30 p.m. Another example was during a study abroad program in
which another US student and I would speak Spanish to each other even when not
engaging the rest of the Spanish-speaking group in the conversation, and we
were asked why we would do that. The answer was that our  goal was to improve
our Spanish, and that the common goal superseded the perceived comfort of us
speaking our first language to each other and/or our shared nationality. In
essence, we were practicing one of Byram’s requirements, that one must be able
to explain one’s culture to someone else in that person’s language. 

This chapter is also where he lists the elements of ICC: linguistic
competence, sociolinguistic competence, and discourse competence, along with
the elements of intercultural competence: skills of interpreting/relating
(savoir comprendre), knowledge (savoirs), critical cultural awareness (savoir
s’engager), attitudes – curiosity/openness (savoir être), and skills of
discovery/interaction (savoir apprendre/faire). He follows up on these by
stating objectives that would be evidence of developing these elements.

In Chapter 3, Byram explores the inherent difficulty in setting objectives for
ICC because often it involves acquiring knowledge and attitudinal changes that
are not easily seen in one’s behavior. He goes so far as to state that “some
objectives can be introduced as curriculum development…but others may not be
compatible with classroom work as usually conceived” (p. 91). He says that
there are three ways in which one acquires intercultural competence: “the
classroom, the pedagogically structured experience outside the classroom and
the independent experience” (91). Of all the savoirs, the ‘knowledge’ one is
the most familiar and suited to classrooms where learners explicitly learn
about the perceptions of cultures of themselves and others, the national
histories, etc. In terms of engaging with other cultures, Byram points out
‘fieldwork’ as the main pathway, which can be attained by study abroad or
virtual experiences in which there is a connection between the learner and
someone from the target culture(s). And for independent experience to be
successful, it is important to be autonomous in one’s learning and to reflect
on the otherness that one feels. 

In Chapter 4, Byram outlines what curricular elements are at play within ICC.
Primarily, values are important, and it is also important to consider in what
order those values will be acquired. Byram presents the analogy to how, in
language teaching, new concepts are often simplified until the learner is
ready to address them in a more complex way. This also necessitates repetition
of an idea in different contexts and with varying levels of specificity. He
also states that the goal of an intercultural speaker should be seen as a
threshold; after this threshold the learning is more about breadth than more
‘advanced’ concepts. When creating a curriculum, he suggests the following
stages for considering the content: geopolitical context, learning context,
developmental factors, identification of objectives, the ICC threshold/goal,
and the sequence in curriculum. It is relatively easy to identify the first
three elements, e.g. in his two cases of high-school French students in the
United States in a region where there are not many French speakers versus the
highly motivated and supported English education of K-12 Taiwanese students.
The other three elements require more thought as to what one wants the
students to achieve/what they can realistically achieve, how to measure
success, and whether they consider their own culture before others.

In Chapter 5, Byram addresses assessment, which he did not do in the first
edition. The chapter has a fair amount of repetition from the previous ones,
but with assessment ideas attached. Byram explains the different between
‘assessment for accountability’ versus ‘assessment for education’,  whereby
the former is more useful for institutions, while the latter is what educators
really care about. The difficulty, as mentioned above, is that learners do not
develop attitudes at the same rate, and it is difficult at times to see the
change. Thus, the prevailing idea in terms of how to assess the ‘savoirs’ is
through the use of portfolio work and continuous (formative) assessment, which
jibes well with the increasing emphasis on project-based curriculums in the
language education.

The conclusion is a reflection and a brief synopsis of how the field has
progressed since the late 1990’s to today. The appendix at the very end has a
nice example of an elementary school program’s implementation of ICC.

EVALUATION

There is little way that anyone can read this book and not believe that all
universities should have a foreign language requirement, but that would take a
rebranding and complete buy-in on the future of foreign language education.
Most programs still place a heavier focus on linguistic competence rather than
on intercultural communicative competence, in which language and culture are
interwoven. That’s where this book comes in as a how-to from theory to
practice of implementing ICC and its benefits. This book argues successfully
that in the face of nationalism, ethnocentrism, etc., there is a great need
for mutual understanding and empathy. As Byram explained, intercultural
‘communicative’ competence gives students an extra lens to view the world; it
is an experience which teaches people how to feel like an ‘other’ and how to
navigate the uncomfortable and unknown. Thus, ICC enriches and strengthens
their skills of interacting with those from other cultures or from those
within their own culture (or a subculture) who hold different values.

One strength of this edition is that it has a powerful perspective with
respect to time since it spans the past twenty plus years and addresses the
critiques directed toward the first version. As someone who had not read the
first edition, I felt that transitions from old to new content went smoothly,
with mostly the citations and references to the present time as obvious
indicators of new content. Another strength is that Byram very clearly states
the definitions of the terms that he adopts and the pros and cons of using a
particular term. Initially I thought that the repetition of the information
between chapters was unnecessary, but it enables anyone to start any chapter
and have enough information to digest the information without looking
elsewhere.

There is a long way to go for all language education to modernize past the
curricula where language is the main focus compared to culture. However,
Byram’s work has laid down a lot of the groundwork for language educators to
make sense of how to incorporate ICC at different levels. Though gifting this
book to your administrator may be a longshot, it definitely belongs in the
hands of anyone that will be teaching and/or creating content for language
education from now on.

REFERENCES

Agar, M. (1994). Language Shock: Understanding the culture of conversation.
New York: William Morrow and Company. Education, 36(1), 63-79.

Baker, W. (2015). Culture and identity through English as a lingua franca:
Rethinking concepts and goals in intercultural communication (Vol. 8). Walter
de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Boris Yelin is currently Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish and
Portuguese at Northeastern University as well as the Coordinator of the
Portuguese Program. His main teaching interests are Spanish, Portuguese and
Spanish Linguistics. His research interests lie in SLA and Pedagogy with a
focus on L3 acquisition. Past research has included looking at the
intersection of language variation and semantics with respect to mood and the
pluricentric nature of Spanish.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2020 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
                   https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2158	
----------------------------------------------------------