Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching: Implications for Effective Teaching and Learning

Part 2: An Evidence-Based Framework of Principles for Effective Intercultural Teaching and Learning

Jonathan Newton and Sandra Shearn

8. A framework of principles for intercultural communicative language teaching and learning

As we noted in our concluding comments in the review of the literature on intercultural language learning and teaching, the research literature in this field lacks a strong evidential base. However, this base is growing rapidly and we can expect a much more substantive body of evidence to emerge over the next decade as interculturally informed programmes are bedded in and their effects on learning researched and reported. We noted that the evidence, limited as it is, indicates that positive intercultural outcomes can be expected from interculturally informed pedagogy that meets certain standards (see chapter 6). We believe that a number of generalizations can be drawn from the currently available research and literature. These generalizations are presented in this Part in the form of six principles for intercultural communicative language teaching (iCLT) (see Table 3). In the discussion that follows we present a rationale for each principle based on the research and theorizing presented in our literature review. The principles are presented visually in Figure 9 in a way that highlights the relationships between them.

Figure 9: Principles for effective intercultural communicative language teaching and learning (iCLT)

Principle 1: iCLT integrates language and culture from the beginning

Intercultural communicative language teaching (iCLT) emphasizes the connectedness of culture and language, and prioritizes the goal of developing interculturally competent³⁰ communicators. The language–culture nexus is seen in the intricate ways that language and culture co-construct each other (Kramsch, 2004). A simple example of co-construction can be seen in the terms ‘mate’ or ‘bro’ in New Zealand English. On the one hand, these terms reflect cultural values of camaraderie and egalitarianism located in New  Zealand’s sociocultural history. On the other hand, to the extent that the terms remain in common parlance, they reconstruct and maintain the cultural values with which they are associated. As Kramsch (1993) expresses it, ‘Every time we speak we perform a cultural act’. The term ‘culture-in-language’ (Carr, 2007) captures this idea and we will use it throughout this section. Culture, from this viewpoint, is dynamic, and in dynamic interplay with language. The implications of this point for language learning are well summed up by Liddicoat (2004, p. 17):

Every message a human being communicates through language is communicated in a cultural context. Cultures shape the ways language is structured and the ways in which language is used. A language learner who has learnt only the grammar and vocabulary of a language is, therefore, not well equipped to communicate in that language.

Intercultural language learning seeks to address this gap by highlighting the permeation of culture through our everyday lives and interactions. It does this by integrating learning about culture and language, rather than treating them as separate strands. Thus, culture becomes a salient dimension of the teaching of all language macroskills (reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and presenting), rather than forming a separate macroskill (Crozet & Liddicoat, 2000). The way teachers can apply this principle to teaching practice is seen in principles 3 to 5: teachers encourage learners to be experientially involved with other languages and cultures through communication and interaction (principle 2); to explore culture-in-language (principle 3); and todiscover connections with other cultural worlds through comparison (principle 4). The integration of culture and language is more easily achieved in classrooms informed by communicative language teaching and task-based language teaching (Ellis, 2003, 2005) since these approaches require active participation and experiential learning. In fact, the adoption of intercultural language teaching promotes a fuller realization of communication by focusing learners’ attention on the effects of the implicit messages conveyed in their choice of linguistic forms and communication strategies.

The first principle concludes with the phrase ‘from the beginning’. This emphasises the point made in the extant literature that teachers should be guiding learners’ conceptualisations of culture from the beginning of the language learning process. As Liddicoat et al. (2003) have pointed out, delaying attention to interculturality simply opens up space for uninformed cultural learning. In Dellit’s (2005, p. 7) words:

[I]gnoring culture does not leave a vacant cultural space which can be filled in later. Rather, it leads to a cultural space which is filled in by uninformed and unanalysed assumptions.

Separating language and culture, therefore, can lead to stereotyping and prejudice. Attention to culture and interculturality in the beginning stages of language learning is easily achievable, because of the rich cultural content found in ostensibly simple language, such as forms of greeting and attendant behaviour. Similarly, aspects of culture such as the coding of family relationships, the naming of rooms in a house and expressions of politeness and respect are all appropriate topics for the beginning stages of learning, while also being equally rich topics for intercultural exploration (Carr, 2007).

Principle 2: iCLT engages learners in genuine social interaction

We have presented a view of culture as dynamic and constructed in people’s lives, practices, and interactions. We have also seen how language is fundamentally social – ‘a social practice, a social accomplishment, a social tool’ (D. Atkinson, 2002, p. 526). In as much as our social lives are culturally shaped, so also is language. As discussed in regard to principle 1, we use the term ‘culture-in-language’ (Carr, 2007) to capture this relationship. For language teaching to adequately respond to these views of language and culture, it must provide learning opportunities that are themselves dynamic, experiential and interactive. Language learning is a social process (Vygotsky, 1978) that flourishes when learners not only observe cultural representations and behaviour, linguistic or visual, but also experience them first hand (see chapter 5 and Figure 7). Such opportunities, layered with guided analysis and reflection, are the necessary basis for exploring and comparing cultures (principles 3 and 4) as exemplified in the two intercultural activities – Byram’s autobiography of key intercultural experiences(2006b) discussed earlier and Finkbeiner and Schmidt’s ABCs model of cultural understanding and communication, discussed in principle 4 (Finkbeiner, 2006; R. Schmidt, 1998). This approach implies a necessary departure from traditional, linguistically focused language teaching, although its emphasis on interaction both complements and embraces the communicative approach which informs language teaching in New  Zealand schools. More fundamentally, it mirrors one of the five key competencies identified in the New Zealand Curriculum (2007), that of ‘relating to others’: ‘relating to others is about interacting effectively with a diverse range of people in a variety of contexts.’ (p. 12)

Intercultural language teaching approaches interaction in two ways. First it treats any interaction involving the target language and/or culture as an opportunity to explore linguistic and cultural boundaries, and to engender awareness of one’s own as well as the other’s ways of communicating and maintaining relationships, and of dealing with cross-cultural misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Secondly, as seen in the ABCs model, interactions are used to directly explore the cultural worlds, beliefs, values and attitudes of others through topics which provide opportunities for explicit discussion of cultural comparisons. Thus, learners experience culture first through the way communication proceeds, and secondly through the content of what is discussed or written about. From an intercultural perspective, interaction is not simply a tool for developing fluency; it provides opportunities for learners to confront their culturally constructed worlds and cultural assumptions, and so to learn more about themselves. The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) makes a similar point, noting that ‘though their learning experiences, students will learn about [among other things] their own values and those of others’ (p. 10).

The richest interactions are likely to be with native speakers of the target language, because the process by which interculturality is acquired is greatly enhanced by opportunities for contact and interaction with such speakers. The success of such interactions depends to a large extent on the culturally appropriate behaviour, verbal and non-verbal, expected by a target language speaker. A focus on effective communication must therefore take into account the way target language speakers live, speak, write and portray themselves, with particular attention to the strategies and features of language and discourse that convey politeness and appropriateness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Byram, 1997). Research has shown that contact with a target language community can have positive effects on student attitudes (e.g. Clément, 1980; Noels & Clément, 1996; Rubenfeld et al., 2006), and interaction with target language speakers is desirable (Dellit, 2005, p. 24). Research by Ingram and O’Neill (2001, 2002) in Australian schools also found that students showed a strong preference for interactional modes of learning and for more interaction with native speakers, both face-to-face and over the internet. However, interaction and exploratory talk with teachers and others, particularly talk that involves tasks (Ellis, 2003) and role plays (Morgan, 1993), also provides important opportunities for learners to notice and explore culture-in-language and to develop flexibility and communicative awareness, two elements of intercultural competence identified by Byram (2006b).

To this point we have used the term ‘interaction’ in its most obvious sense, meaning ‘social interaction’, both oral and written (including modes that merge this distinction such as SMS language or txtspk). However, it is possible to extend the notion of interaction to encompass the way the learner engages with a text, or visual/performative form of cultural expression. Interaction here refers to the way the reader/observer/listener actively constructs knowledge through their interpretation and interrogation of cultural input (Crichton, Paige, Papadematre, & A. Scarino, 2004). Intercultural language teaching encourages learners to explore the values, beliefs and thought processes as well as the sociocultural and historical contexts reflected in cultural input (Finkbeiner & Koplin, 2002). Thus, one of four cognitive capacities that define intercultural competence according to Byram (2006b) is ‘interpreting and relating’, defined as ‘an ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents or events from one’s one’ (p. 25).

Principle 3: iCLT encourages and develops an exploratory and reflective approach to culture and culture-in-language

We have seen that culture encompasses much more than the traditional arts, conventional practices, institutions and objectively describable, visible manifestations of people’s lives. Using the metaphor of an iceberg (Weaver, 1993), these dimensions of culture make up the small, visible segment of the iceberg above the surface. Beneath the surface lies a much larger, less visible part of culture made up of values, beliefs, and thought patterns. Much of the work of Russell Bishop and his colleagues in the Te Kōtahitanga project involves teachers coming to understand the invisible culture of Māori children in mainstream classrooms – what they refer to as ‘Māori sense-making processes (ways of knowing)’ (Bishop & Glynn, 1999, p. 131) – and shaping pedagogy to embrace these culturally specific processes (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). Kramsch (1993) gives the very tangible example from an international context of the practice of keeping an office door closed in Germany, but open in America. As she explains, underlying this visible display of culture lie less visible values of friendliness (open door) and order and respect (closed door). But without an intercultural perspective in play, to an American visitor, the closed door to a German office might well be interpreted as a sign of unfriendliness, while a German visitor to America could interpret the open door as a sign of disorder and lack of respect (p. 209). In these cases, what is needed is intercultural understanding of how our cultural identity provides a lens through which we view and interpret other cultures.

The iceberg metaphor can be applied equally to culture-in-language. Culture is manifest in language in obvious ways, such as in overt politeness forms (e.g. Japanese forms of address) and in culturally distinct genres such as karakia, an ‘ava ceremony, or a wedding speech. But it is also deeply embedded in language in less obvious ways such as the requirements for polite and formal language, the patterns and extent of conversational feedback, the degree of tolerance for overlapping speech and interruptions, the degree of indirectness in speech acts such as requests and refusals, and a vast number of other communicative subtleties displayed in the everyday use of language.

Culture defies easy description and involves much more than ‘facts’. Teaching that focuses largely on learning about visible culture thus misses a large portion of cultural experience. As Ingram and O’Neill (2001) point out: ‘[K]nowledge alone leaves learners ensconced in their own culture looking out at the other culture and observing its differences (often judgementally) – rather like walking through a museum’ (p. 14). iCLT responds to this issue by shifting focus from transmission of objective cultural knowledge to exploration by learners of both visible and invisible culture, and, most importantly, to exploration of ‘culture-in-language’. Exploring culture involves learners in constructing knowledge from experience and reflection. Factual information has its place, but this information is interrogated by learners so as to reveal insights and understanding about the lived culture experience of others. Active construction of meaning, and critical enquiry are both essential components of this approach (Carr, 2007).

Exploratory learning is used widely across educational contexts (e.g. Adshead, 1993; Snell, 2005), and is encapsulated in the vision expressed in the New Zealand Curriculum (2007) for a curriculum that will produce young people who are ‘critical and creative thinkers’, and ‘active seekers, users and creators of knowledge’ (p. 8). Exploratory learning involves a process of discovery that allows learners to develop their individual conceptualizations of culture and to decentre from their taken-for-granted cultural world. The starting point is usually learners’ exploration of their own culture and cultural identity, and through this lens of self-awareness, examination of their attitudes towards the target language and culture, looking at what they already know or believe, before gaining new insights (Byram, 2006a; Byram et al., 1991; Finkbeiner, 2006; Kramsch, 2006).

As learners begin to understand the concept of culture and cultural differences, they should begin to understand that culture learning is not simply a matter of accruing information and facts. Instead, it involves observing and analyzing what Byram (1997, p. 19) calls ‘social processes and their outcomes’. In other words, they develop ‘critical understanding of their own and other societies’ (ibid.), an awareness of what constitutes culture, and how it affects everybody’s behaviour and use of language. In this way, learners can challenge and replace cultural stereotypes which ‘exoticise and essentialize’ members of another culture with more empathetic and self-aware perceptions and attitudes (Kramsch, 2006, p. 107). This exploratory approach to iCLT is supported and exemplified in particular by Byram and Cain (1998), and Liddicoat et al. (2003). Byram’s autobiography of key intercultural experiences (2006b) is a teaching and learning tool that shows how learners can be guided to explore and reflect on an interaction with someone from another culture or country. Through these processes they can cultivate aspects of intercultural competence, such as empathy and communicative awareness.

An additional aspect of this principle is that it involves the teacher as well as the learners in the process of exploration. Research by Byram and Cain (1998) led them to the conclusion that teachers themselves are learning, as they allow students to explore and discover new facts and ideas and make comparisons with what they already know. The idea that teachers themselves have to remain open to new ideas and admit that they are not the founts of all knowledge is also stressed by Byram and Fleming (1998) and J. K. Phillips (2003). This is congruent with the concept of ‘ako’ (to learn as well as to teach) in kaupapa Māori (Bishop et al., 2002).

It is important to note that this principle does not preclude traditional approaches to culture, which involve information about a country, its institutions, society and history. Indeed, Byram (1997) argues that ideally, the teacher would combine the two approaches, provided that learners are encouraged to see cultural information as subjective and dynamic (ibid.). It is also recognised that the age of learners will govern the extent to which critical self-reflection and ‘decentring’ from one’s taken-for-granted cultural world are feasible (Byram, 2006b; Lange, 2003). Similarly, the level of linguistic skills development will govern the amount of exploration which can occur in the target language. An exploratory approach to culture opens up many opportunities for learners to make connections between their cultures. This is discussed in relation to the next principle.

Principle 4: iCLT fosters explicit comparisons and connections between languages and cultures

Comparing languages and cultures is a fundamental process in intercultural language learning, and is widely discussed in the literature. Both Michael Byram and Claire Kramsch, two leading international scholars in intercultural language learning who are referred to frequently in this report, have written extensively on the insights into self and others that can be achieved through guided comparisons between cultures (Byram, 2003, 2006a; Kramsch, 1993, 2006). In increasingly multicultural classrooms, these comparisons and connections can be multi-faceted, as learners explore and share each other’s cultures, while cooperatively exploring a new culture and learning a new language. The development of cultural awareness through exploration aims to gradually promote an ‘inner sense of the equality of cultures, an increased understanding of [one’s] own and other people’s cultures, and a positive interest in how cultures both connect and differ’ (Tomlinson, 2001). In a practical guide to integrating culture in language instruction, Tomlinson and Matsuhara (2004, p. 4) suggest that teachers begin and end each activity ‘in the minds of the learners’, through such activities as encouraging them to think about an experience in their own culture, before providing them with a similar one in another culture, or ‘getting [learners] to “translate” a new experience in another culture into an equivalent experience in their own culture’ (ibid.). Maintaining this kind of awareness of culture is a primary goal of intercultural language learning.

If comparison is to be effective as learning for iCLT, it needs to be a reflective, interpretive comparison which draws on the learners’ current knowledge as well as the new knowledge they are encountering. This is captured in the ABC model of cultural understanding and communication (Finkbeiner, 2006; R. Schmidt, 1998). This learning tool involves three steps:

The three steps of the ABCs
A as in Autobiography
 
Each learner writes or narrates relevant aspects and/or key events from his or her autobiography.
 
B as in Biography
 
Learners cooperate with a partner from a different cultural background. Each of them conducts an in-depth, audio or videotaped interview with a partner from a culture different from his or her own. The interviewer will then construct a biography describing the key events in that person’s life.
 
C as in Cross-Cultural Analysis and Appreciation of Differences
 
Learners study their autobiographies and compare them to the biographies they have written. They write down a list of the similarities and differences. (Finkbeiner, 2006)

The third step touches on Kramsch’s statement of the well known truth that ‘it is through the eyes of others that we get to know ourselves and others’ (1993, p. 222). It is important to emphasise that comparison of a target culture with one’s own culture is not an end in itself. Instead, it is a process which is designed to facilitate movement by the learner into what is referred to in the intercultural literature as ‘a third place’ (Kramsch, 1993). This third place is an intercultural position between cultures, a position from which the learner can negotiate differences and interact comfortably across cultures by drawing on ‘a reflective capacity to deal with cultural differences and to modify behaviour when needed’ (Dellit, 2005, p. 17).

Comparing cultures is a practical focus for language teaching which aims to allow learners to develop more sophisticated concepts of culture, and helps to undermine notions of the immutability of cultural values and cross-cultural prejudices. Instruction focused on raising cultural awareness and making connections has the ultimate goal of producing what Byram (2006a, p. 4) calls ‘intercultural speakers’ – that is, people who have ‘the ability to communicate and interact across cultural boundaries’ (Byram, 1997, p. 7) (see chapter 5).
 Finally, a brief comment on the word ‘explicit’ as it occurs in this principle. Evidence from the literature makes it clear that intercultural issues need to be addressed explicitly and openly rather than being left to take care of themselves, on the assumption that they will be imbibed indirectly through exposure and experience alone. Indeed, some research evidence suggests that, without guidance, language teaching can have an inconclusive, or worse, a negative effect on cross-cultural attitudes (Ingram & O'Neill, 2001, 2002; Mantle-Bromley, 1995; see also Kramsch & Thorne, 2001; O'Dowd, 2003; Ware, 2005 on cultural misunderstandings in computer-mediated cross-cultural encounters between language students).

Principle 5: iCLT acknowledges and responds appropriately to diverse learners and learning contexts

Teaching a language interculturally entails recognising and embracing diversity in the classroom, especially as it relates to learners’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds, a crucial consideration for New Zealand teachers facing ever more culturally diverse classes (e.g. Alton-Lee, 2003, 2005; Bishop & Berryman, 2006; Bishop & Glynn, 1999; Samu-Wendt, 2004, 2006; Tuuta et al., 2004). This growing body of New Zealand research on teaching for diverse learners, and culturally responsive teaching highlights the effectiveness of instructional practices that match the culturally shaped ways of knowing that learners bring to the classroom. Thus, one of the characteristics of quality teaching for diverse students identified by Alton-Lee (2003) in a recent best evidence synthesis on education for diverse learners in schooling states that:

Effective links are created between school and other cultural contexts in which students are socialized, to facilitate learning. (p. 3)

Alton-Lee identifies a set of research-based features related to this characteristic, two of which closely align with intercultural language teaching:

Student diversity is utilized effectively as a pedagogical resource.

Quality teaching respects and affirms cultural identity (including gender identity) and optimises educational opportunities. (ibid.)

As discussed in an earlier section, these characteristics have been put into practice in the Te Kōtahitanga project, in which all teachers in the participating schools, including language teachers, are trained in kaupapa Māori based pedagogy (Bishop et al., 2003). As a result of the implementation of this culturally responsive teaching, the attitudes and values of students towards school have shifted and there has been greater engagement in learning activities and improved levels of achievement. Applying similar ideas to language classes, a teacher at James Cook High School in Auckland taught Japanese to a class of diverse students including a proportion of Māori. Instead of focussing solely on the target language, multicultural classes participated in exploring many cultures, thus developing intercultural competence alongside Japanese communicative skills (personal communication, Gail Spence, April 2007). Teachers clearly have a responsibility to manage the representation of and participation in culture(s) which are new to students, and to show an appreciation of and respect for the culture(s) that students bring with them into the classroom. Our earlier discussion of the importance of fostering comparisons and connections between languages and cultures (principle 4) provides a way of doing this.

The importance of acknowledging diversity is also implied in one of the 10 principles for successful instructed learning proposed by Ellis (2005, p. 41), namely that:

Instruction needs to take account of individual differences in learners.

However, here Ellis discusses only individual differences in two cognitive variables: aptitude and motivation. Indeed, this list of 10 principles is overwhelmingly cognitive in orientation; nowhere is the sociocultural context of language learning addressed. We see the current report as providing an important sociocultural balance to the set of principles proposed by Ellis.

Motivation warrants further discussion since the extent to which each individual is willing and able to learn a new language in the classroom is influenced by motivational dispositions developed through their family, community upbringing and schooling (Dörnyei, 2001a, pp. 30-41). As Dörnyei notes, ‘setting-specific sociocultural values [for example, the value placed in education, cultural beliefs about learning, and social support for learning from family and peers] mediate achievement cognition, cognition and behaviour’ (p. 32). In other words, diversity will be reflected in a range of motivational dispositions. Motivation has been extensively researched in educational psychology and second language acquisition. Evidence shows the importance of specific teaching strategies for creating motivating learning conditions and for maintaining and protecting motivation. Dörnyei (2001b) presents 35 of these practical strategies for motivating learners in the language classroom.³¹ Social context is foregrounded in the following three:

• develop a collaborative relationship with the student’s parents
  
• promote the developments of group cohesiveness
  
• promote ‘integrative’ values by encouraging a positive and open-minded disposition towards the L2 [second language]and its speakers, and towards foreignness in general.

The third of these strategies hints at another aspect of diversity. Just as each learner has a unique set of attributes and learning experiences, so also each of the 14 languages taught in New Zealand schools is uniquely positioned, by virtue of the relationship between the communities for whom the language is a native tongue or lingua franca, and communities within the wider New Zealand environment, as well as in schools and classrooms. Intercultural language teaching responds to these relationships in two ways.

The first way intercultural language teaching responds to relationships between cultures and languages is through seeking to connect learners to the target language culture, and thereby to facilitate learning opportunities through interaction and cultural experience. How these connections are made depends on the aspects of setting described in this principle.

For New Zealand’s two legislated official languages, te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language³², the connections and opportunities are shaped not only by proximity to speech communities for these languages, but also by the political momentum that their status as official languages of New Zealand provides and, in the case of te reo, by Treaty of Waitangi and the status of the Māori people as tangata whenua. Pasifika languages in the curriculum (gagana Sāmoa, Tongan, vagahau Niue, Cook Islands Māori and gagana Tokelau) also have the benefit of substantial speech communities located within New  Zealand, and the added dimension of a substantial number of Pasifika learners in the classrooms learning these languages as heritage languages.

One of the features of the setting of Chinese and to a lesser extent, Japanese and Korean is the number of native speakers of these languages studying as international students or recently arrived residents. For certain languages, especially languages associated with more typically distant speech communities such as French, German and Spanish, telecollaboration³³ opens up a wealth of opportunities for intercultural communication (Kramsch & Thorne, 2001; O'Dowd, 2003, 2007; Ware, 2005).

The second way that intercultural language teaching responds to relationships between cultures and languages is by treating these relationships as topics to be explored and learnt about as part of language learning. Thus, one of the cognitive capacities that underlies intercultural competence, according to Byram (2006b), is ‘[k]nowledge of social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in one’s interlocutor’s country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction’ (p. 24). Similarly, the New Zealand Curriculum (2007) states that the interactions and learning experiences that take place in a school should encourage students to learn about, ‘the values on which New Zealand’s cultural and institutional traditions are based’, and ‘the values of other groups and cultures (p. 10). An intercultural stance on learning in the language classroom provides many opportunities for these values to find expression.

Principle 5 has addressed two types of diversity in relation to language learning: cultural and linguistic diversity among learners and diversity in the ways that different languages are present in the New Zealand learning context. Both are a source of intercultural learning opportunities through which learners come to value ‘diversity, as found in our different cultures, languages and heritages’ (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 10).

Principle 6: iCLT emphasises intercultural communicative competence rather than native-speaker competence

The final principle addresses the goal of language teaching and learning. It challenges the often implicit benchmarking of learner proficiency or progress against notional native-speaker competence, and proposes instead that intercultural competence provides a more realistic goal of instruction.

One of the more obvious and intractable problems with the model of native speaker competence is that it is an impossible target for most language learners (Kramsch, 1997, 2006; Marx, 2002; Norton, 2000). Furthermore, the goal of native speaker competence may assume an undesirable assimilationist goal, encouraging the learner to separate from his/her own culture and to adopt a new sociocultural identity (Byram, 1997; Marx, 2002; cf. Siskin, 2003).

One of the reasons for the pervasive influence of the native-speaker model is that it is an invisible but nevertheless strongly present influence in the influential concept of ‘communicative competence’. However, from an intercultural perspective, communicative competence is itself still incomplete, since it is concerned only with speakers within a speech community. It thereby fundamentally fails to identify the competencies required to communicate interculturally, or across cultural boundaries (Byram, 1997, 2003). The assumption that native speakers are models for cultural competence is also misguided, according to Byram (2003), because no native speaker is an authority on their culture, in the same way that no individual is a perfect linguistic model (because of variations in class, region, register, and so on). The implication of these points is that language learners should be encouraged to critically analyze whatever they observe in native-speaker interactions, as proposed in principle 3, and to make informed choices about what behaviour is an appropriate model for imitation.

Another reason for not taking native-speaker norms (linguistic or cultural) as preferred models is that there is always more to learn, because cultures and languages are always changing. This reinforces the notion that schools need to prepare learners for change and life-long learning, a central part of the vision for education in New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2007). The Council of Europe also recognises that ‘language learning is a lifelong task [and therefore] the development of a young person’s motivation, skill and confidence in facing new language experience out of school comes to be of central importance’ (2001, p. 5).

A shift in emphasis from native-speaker competence to intercultural competence broadens the goals of instruction to include the knowledge, skills, awareness and attitudes which enable learners to ‘meet the challenges of communication across language and cultural boundaries’ (Council of Europe, 2001, p. xii). Thus, intercultural learning focuses not only on knowledge about a second language culture, but also on other less tangible, more subjective competencies. These are captured in Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence (discussed in chapter 4 of the literature review, and summarized below) which continues to be widely used in the literature (e.g. Belz, 2003; L Sercu, 2004) and provides a concise and tangible starting point for understanding the multifaceted construct of intercultural competence.

The components of intercultural communicative competence as presented by Byram (1997) are:

• attitudes
  
  • values and beliefs, curiosity and openness
    
  • relativising self and valuing others
    
• knowledge
  
  • of self and others in communication
    
  • of other cultures
    
  • of processes of interaction: individual and societal
    
• skills
  
  • for interpreting and relating
    
• skills 
  • for discovering and interacting
    
• awareness
  
  • critical cultural awareness

If intercultural communicative competence is to be the goal of language learning, then this will have far-reaching consequences for pedagogy. It requires, for instance, that classroom tasks and communicative opportunities are used for intercultural learning. This is achieved by including activities and finding opportunities to guide learners’ attention to the various elements in the model such as their own values and beliefs, knowledge of self, the ability to interpret indirectness in discourse, critical awareness of the power of language, and so on.

Byram (2006b, pp. 17–18) translates the model of intercultural communicative competence above into a set of four overall aims of intercultural language learning:

1. The acquisition of the linguistic and cultural skills of intercultural communication;
2. The development of an aptitude for critical thinking, questioning and challenging assumptions;
3. A change from exclusive identification with familiar communities and in particular, the nation state and national identity, to inclusive identification with others with related interests in other societies; the acquisition of new international identities, which complement national and local identities;
4. Taking action through involvement with people of other societies and liberating oneself and others from assumptions and ways of being and doing which are oppressive or constraining.

In these aims we see the overall agenda for iCLT presented clearly and powerfully.

Thus, the evidence-based framework of six principles for effective intercultural communicative teaching and learning (iCLT) presented in Part 2 identify and describe a set of core claims concerning intercultural language learning that emerge from and find support in the extensive and rapidly growing research literature in this field.

Footnotes

30. Intercultural competence is discussed extensively in the literature review and is briefly elaborated in the discussion of Principle 2 below.
31. Dörnyei (2001b) presents these 35 strategies in a useful summary table (pp. 135–144) which includes additional practical applications of each strategy as well as a checklist to guide teachers in their application of these strategies to their classrooms.
32. Although English is a lingua franca in New Zealand, it is not an official language by statute.
33. Telecollaboration is defined by Belz (2003) as ‘the use of internet communication tools by internationally dispersed students of language in institutionalized settings in order to promote the development of (a) foreign language linguistic competence, and (b) intercultural competence’ (p. 69).