[EDLING:2352] Book notice: Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence: An International Investigation

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence: An International
Investigation

Lies Sercu et al.,Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural
Competence: An International Investigation
SERIES: Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education 10
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters, Clevedon
YEAR: 2005

Revied by Leonhard A. G. Voltmer, lecturer in Intercultural Mediation at
the University of Trento, Italy.

SUMMARY

How do foreign language (FL) teachers feel and act with respect to the
intercultural dimension of their language teaching? In 2001, 424
FL-teachers in seven countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland, Mexico, Greece,
Spain and Sweden) answered a questionnaire for a quantitative, comparative
study.

The objectives of FL teachers are to motivate and enable students to use
the FL in practice. Therefore they place more emphasis on teaching
language than culture. As a consequence they lack time, training and
appropriate teaching materials for the teaching of the culture in question
(chapter 2).  Teachers claim that they are familiar enough with the
FL-culture (chapter 3). Teachers in different countries have different
views of their students' predisposition towards FL-learning, towards the
FL-culture and FL-contact.  In Bulgaria pupils are positively biased
towards the foreign language, its people and culture, whereas in Spain
they are not (chapter 4). The picture teachers give of the type, frequency
and time they devote to culture-teaching is complex. On average the
results are satisfying, but there are significant disparities between the
countries (chapter 5).  Teachers use text-books extensively, even if they
deem them useful only to a certain degree (chapter 6). Teachers organize
exchange programs and school trips to expose their students to the
target-language. They know that this creates an opportunity for
intercultural learning (chapter 7).  Teachers would like to promote
intercultural competence through their FL-teaching, but they are unsure
about the methodology, the timing and the effects of such teaching
(chapter 8). Hence they prefer an integrated approach of teaching language
and culture together, but ultimately hesitate to put it into practice
(chapter 9). Teachers treat topics depending on how familiar they are with
them, and they generally teach culture based on their level of personal
valuation. Finally, some teachers are willing to integrate intercultural
competence teaching but don't apply it in practice (chapter 10). Cultural
competence should become an attainment target of FL-teaching (chapter 11).

The authors recommend the following educational policy: Teachers should be
provided with examples of how language and culture teaching can be joined
together. They should be assisted in choosing and adapting teaching
materials and be encouraged to use experiential learning techniques for
that purpose. Therefore teacher education should comprise: methodology
courses in culture learning theory for younger learners, including
theories of ''culture shock''; courses for how to create experiential
learning environments; courses in anthropology, ethnographic investigation
techniques and social psychology focussing on the individual.


EVALUATION

The book is well structured. The main findings are clearly stated, but
could have been further highlighted graphically. The policy
recommendations are sensible and clear. The study defines an average
profile of all FL-teachers despite the ad-hoc sampling of the
participating teachers with respect to the age of teachers and students,
mother-language of teachers and students, language taught, hours of
teaching and teaching experience, public or private employment, the
institutional role of language teaching, national particularities, etc.

The study compares the different countries where the FL teaching takes
place. It deviates only once from this principle: With regard to the
pupils' views of the culture associated with the target language, the
target languages English, French, German and Spanish are compared instead
of the countries. In fact, this imperfect quantitative approach has been
criticised by Bai Rui (2006), who would have preferred a multiple methods
approach to provide more insight into teachers' beliefs. Nevertheless, the
reader may reach the same conclusion by filling out the questionnaire
(Annex 1, pp. 186-214 of the book) with a sufficient degree of
introspection.

Although the book does not pretend to be about theory (p. ix), which makes
it difficult to judge the impact of some of the findings (as Bai Rui
(2006)  remarks), some comments of conceptual nature may be appropriate.

1. The study is based on the premise that language and culture cannot be
separated and should therefore be taught together. Language courses should
become integrated language-and-culture courses.

If culture is always an inseparable part of language, then language
courses have always been language-and-culture courses. Teaching the use of
the polite form of address, for example, requires context and has always
been taught through the use of dialogues. One should expect an automatic,
at least implicit, comparison with the student's own cultural standards
for politeness.

Transferred to the study, this means that the culture awareness of the
teachers does not necessarily correspond to the level of culture in their
FL-teaching. It may correspond much more to their level of intercultural
communication skills. The difference between the two is that ''cultural
competence involves ... a specific cultural area ... whereas intercultural
competence involves knowledge, skills and attitudes at the interface
between several cultural areas'' (p. viii). Intercultural competence is
surely a useful skill, but it does not substitute cultural competence and
even less so linguistic competence. If the ''cultural turn'' in language
teaching does not take the language-and-culture path, but the
language-and-intercultural competence path, then not only does it alter
the path to the same goal, but it changes the goal itself. There is no
doubt that psychology, economic geography and intercultural competence
facilitate communication, but we wouldn't want to integrate all of them
into a language course. The opposite is the case. The more we think that
those skills are important, the more we should focus on them individually
and teach them separately in special courses.

Following the study, Lies Sercu, the author of 80 and co-author of the
other 120 pages, conducted research to understand if FL-learning is more
effective when it integrates the cultural context or when language and
cultural context come as two separate units. This fundamental research
question is, in fact, preliminary to the 2001 study.

Chapter 6 is dedicated to what teachers think FL teaching materials should
be like. While the results are surely interesting as market research, it
cannot be taken for granted that the desired textbooks for teaching are
also the most efficient for learning.

2. There is another hidden presupposition for the study: Intercultural is
taken as international. It is apparent the authors are aware of the
underlying problem. The questionnaire asks ''What percentage of your
school's population are ethnic minority community children?'' (Question
2.2, p. 189) and the situation is ''unclear'' (p. 215) in the sense that
some teachers are in front of a rather homogeneous class, while others are
not.

It is clear that the reflection on one's own cultural background is
different in a (socially, ethnically, etc.) heterogeneous group, although
not necessarily easier. Once you have a couple of Indian students in your
class, the 450,000 Indians in London will appear less as a surprise. From
this point of view it is a sign of self-awareness when teachers claim to
be ''sufficiently familiar with the culture of the foreign language they
teach'' (p. 47) rather than ''very familiar'', because that would require
an insight into, for example, the Greek community in Melbourne of more
than 800,000 persons.

The FL-teaching situation cannot easily be limited to one-on-one cultural
contact. We know that. But when the study gives the example of Belgian
teachers being familiar with German culture, the point might be missed
that the Belgian students may not all be of a classical Belgian culture
and the motivating part of German culture might be Turkish rap rather than
Goethe.  Intercultural competence is becoming increasingly complex. It is
little wonder that teachers are not always satisfied with their textbooks,
and prefer to stick to language teaching, which already requires all of
their intercultural competence.

The very progressive Holliday, Hyde & Kullman (2004) are skeptical of the
concept of ''national culture'', as such. All the same, FL-teaching seems
to have the cultural component already in the language and does not need
to make further reference to national cultures. But one thing is clear:
Teachers will need more intercultural competence, as will students.
Therefore the conclusion of the book, and the policy proposals, are
conducive.


REFERENCES

Bai Rui, Review of Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence
by Lies Sercu et al., in: Teachers College Record Volume 108 Number 8,
2006, p. 1589-1592.

A. Holliday, M. Hyde, J. Kullman, Intercultural Communication - An
advanced
resource book, Routledge Applied Linguistics, Routledge 2004, Linguist
List
review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-3585.html.

Research project of Lies Sercu:
http://www.kuleuven.be/research/researchdatabase/project/3H03/3H030507.htm

APPENDIX

Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface

Chapter 1: Teaching foreign languages in an intercultural world
Lies Sercu

Chapter 2: Objectives of foreign language education and culture teaching
time
Paloma Castro and Lies Sercu

Chapter 3: Familiarity and contacts with foreign cultures
Phyllis Ryan and Lies Sercu

Chapter 4: Pupils' culture-and-language learning profile
Mara del Carmen Mndez Garca and Lies Sercu

Chapter 5: Culture teaching practices
Ewa Bandura and Lies Sercu

Chapter 6: Culture in foreign language teaching materials
Leah Davcheva and Lies Sercu

Chapter 7: Experiential culture learning activities: school trips and
exchange projects Chryssa Laskaridou and Lies Sercu

Chapter 8: Opinions regarding different facets of intercultural competence
teaching Lies Sercu

Chapter 9: The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher
Lies Sercu

Chapter 10: The future of intercultural competence in foreign language
education: Recommendations for professional development, educational
policy and research Lies Sercu

References
Appendix 1: Questionnaire
Appendix 2: Bonferroni multiple comparison test results

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Language and languages - Study and teaching.
Intercultural communication.
Multicultural education.
Communicative competence.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER Leonhard A. G. Voltmer is jurilinguist. He studied law
in Munich and Paris, Legal Theory in Brussels and Lund, and Romance
Languages in Salzburg and Munich. From 2001 to 2005 worked for the
European Academy of Bolzano (Italy) in terminology, translation and
language normation. His experiences in the computational linguistic
treatment of multilingual legal data have become a Ph.D. thesis at the
University of Munich (http://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/archive/00003716/),
which was awarded a magna cum laude. Dr. Voltmer is increasingly involved
in lecturing and has given courses for all age groups. In 2006-07 he is
teaching Intercultural Mediation in Degree and Master Courses at the
University of Trento, and German at the School of Translators and
Interpreters (SSLMIT) at Forli. Dr. Voltmer's research agenda focuses on
the combination of disciplines and discourses: The dialogue between
cultures (Intercultural Communication or Mediation), between lawyers and
laymen, between computational linguists and language practitioners, and
between the different scientific disciplines in Legal Theory. For more
details, visit his website at:
http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/autoren/mitarbeiter/lvoltmer/.


Forwarded from Linguist-List http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-477.html