Lisseth Rojas-Barreto

Jairo Enrique Castañeda-Trujillo

Jhon Eduardo Mosquera Pérez

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47133/tegc_ch50  

ABSTRACT

The world is interconnected with people from multiple cultures who are interacting in a third space of confluence (Zhou & Pilcher, 2019). To help English learners navigate in this third space and participate in globalization, teachers need to learn more about interculturality, Intercultural Competence (Fantini, 2000), and Intercultural Communicative Competence (Byram et al., 2001). In this chapter, you will learn about these concepts and how to promote them among English learners through activities such as experiential learning, intercultural workshops, virtual cultural exchanges, and telecollaboration projects. After further developing your own interculturality and intercultural skills, you can then guide your students in developing theirs. 

Keywords: intercultural competencies, intercultural communicative competence, interculturality, globalization, third space of confluence, experiential learning, telecollaboration

How to cite this chapter: 

Rojas-Barreto, L., Castañeda-Trujillo, J. & Mosquera Pérez, J. (2023). Developing Intercultural Competencies. In V. Canese & S. Spezzini (Eds.), Teaching English in Global Contexts, Language, Learners and Learning (pp. 607-616). Editorial Facultad de Filosofía, UNA. https://doi.org/10.47133/tegc_ch50

INTRODUCTION

All countries have their own cultural traditions as evidenced by traditional dishes, customs, and beliefs plus many other cultural traits. In fact, within any given country, some people even have regional dishes, customs, and beliefs. These cultural traits differ greatly because of the dynamic, context-sensitive nature of culture. Because of such differences, it is important for everyone to learn to recognize, respect, appreciate, and celebrate cultural traits. This is called interculturality. 

In the 21st century, interculturality has began gaining importance in English language teaching (ELT) as its own field of knowledge. It represents how people from diverse cultures interact in a third space of confluence (Dietz, 2018; Zhou & Pilcher, 2019). By learning to navigate in this space, people from different cultures relate with each other and expand their interculturality. As a field, interculturality seeks to promote effective and appropriate behaviors during interactions with people from other cultures (Byram, 2021). As a practice, interculturality guides families with raising children to be empathetic, adaptable, and willing to learn about other cultures. 

Given the globalization and virtual accessibility of the 21st century, all educators (especially language teachers) need to develop interculturality. By doing so, we strengthen our Intercultural Competence (IC) and are able to communicate and act flexibly, appropriately, empathetically, and cooperatively in a myriad of complex environments with individuals from other cultures who have different expectations, practices, and attitudes (Fantini, 2000). By strengthening our IC, we can also build Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), which is an “ability to interact with ‘others,’ to accept other perspectives and perceptions of the world, to mediate between different perspectives, to be conscious of their evaluations of difference” (Byram et al., 2001, p. 5). 

In this chapter, you will learn about interculturality, IC, and ICC and about their respective roles in ELT. You will learn about major dimensions needed to promote interculturality in your classroom.  You will also learn how to promote ICC through experiential learning, intercultural workshops, virtual cultural exchanges, and telecollaboration projects.

BACKGROUND

Historically, IC has been perceived from different angles. Although these distinct perspectives might appear to lack consensus, this is not problematic given how IC has frequently undergone deconstruction because of its complex and context-bound nature (Dervin & Gross, 2016). Among these varying definitions, an important convergence is viewing IC as embodying one or more abilities such as 

• ability to develop and maintain relationships, 

• ability to communicate effectively and appropriately with minimal loss or distortion, and 

• ability to attain compliance and obtain cooperation with others. (Fantini, 2000, p. 26)

Other definitions of IC (Byram et al., 2001; Dietz, 2018) have included abilities such as the following:

• ability to establish one’s own identity while mediating and negotiating meaning among cultures, 

• ability to lose focus by no longer focusing just on one’s own culture but rather being able to see beyond one’s self and focus on other cultures (i.e., moving from ethnocentric to intercultural),

• ability to relativize one’s own point of view by recognizing one’s positionality relative to the positionality of others and their cultures, and 

• ability to understand another’s point of view. 

Within the ELT field, a precursor to ICC was the movement against approaches favoring “the memorization of grammatical paradigms and the word-for-word translation of decontextualized sentences” (Kramsch, 2006, p. 249). This movement initially led to communicative competence, which described what native speakers know that enables them to interact effectively with other native speakers in a spontaneous, unrehearsed way. Yet, despite attempted redefinitions, communicative competence continued to be questioned because the concept positioned native speakers as a model for language learners, thus implying that language learners are able to become native speakers of the target language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). Upon feeling pressured to perhaps imitate native speakers, some language learners might exclude their own social context, culture, and identity from both the learning process and the communication process. This concern led to IC and eventually to ICC.

MAJOR DIMENSIONS

To help promote learners’ interculturality, it is important to understand pragmatic competence and the ICC model.

Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatic competence is understanding what is and is not appropriate in a culture to avoid breakdowns and misunderstandings (Domaneschi & Bambini, 2020). This competence is related to metalinguistics, which is the language awareness necessary to participate in a communication act. Pragmatic competence is based on knowledge of the communicative context and of a person’s linguistic resources. This competence can help students share personal feelings and thoughts, thus strengthening their rapport with interlocutors (Godwin-Jones, 2019), who are the other people participating in the same conversation. To enhance your students’ pragmatic competence, consider doing the following:

• select materials and activities that generate reflection,

• implement activities that lead to understanding and negotiating the cultural aspects being analyzed as well as possibly accepting or rejecting them,

• design activities for your students to better understand an interlocutor’s context, 

• integrate knowledge of the other, and 

• create an accurate intercultural background for their conversations. 

Pragmatic competence is developed when students participate in activities such as experiential learning, intercultural workshops, virtual cultural exchanges, and telecollaboration projects. Here, students are placed in real-world settings and convert a learning process into a transformational experience. In such activities, students develop pragmatic competence by creating their own knowledge. This type of learning is based on constructivist theories that view knowledge as being built individually and collectively (Kolb, 2015) as shown below with the ICC Model.

The ICC Model

To increase your students’ interculturality, consider adopting the ICC model, which is one of the most popular intercultural models used in language classrooms. This ICC model (Byram, 2021; Byram et al., 2001) is composed of the following five dimensions of critical cultural awareness: 

• skills to interpret and relate,

• skills to discover and interact,

• knowledge of self and other and of individual and societal interaction,

• education about critical cultural awareness and political education, and

• attitudes for relativizing self and valuing other.

Of these ICC dimensions, the first two are identified as skills (skills for interpreting and relating and skills for discovering and interacting). These skill-based dimensions refer to perspectives that individuals portray during intercultural encounters, such as respect, willingness, open attitude, and suspension of judgment. The other three dimensions are identified as knowledge (self and other, individual interaction, and societal interaction), education (critical cultural awareness and political education), and attitudes (relativizing self and valuing others). These three dimensions are commonly associated with an individual’s capacity to relativize values and behaviors. By learning to relativize, individuals are able to treat values and behaviors relative to a specific culture rather than absolute for all cultures. Through their growing capacity to relativize, these individuals become objectively aware of differences relative to the norms of their culture—yet conditioned by it and dependent upon it. They also become more critical and reflexive about their surrounding reality and are able to move from a culture-bound position to a universal position. Similarly, these five ICC dimensions can guide you with advancing your own ICC and also with promoting your students’ ICC such as described in the following section.

PEDAGOGICAL APPLICATIONS

To promote interculturality and ICC in physical and virtual classrooms, identify strategies that incorporate cultural aspects in ways that are personal and real for your students. Select online tools to establish synchronous and asynchronous contact with your partner teachers in another country and with their students. The goal is for the students in both countries to co-construct an understanding about their own culture and the other culture (Godwin-Jones, 2019). Finally, match these strategies and tools to implement activities such as the following: experiential learning, intercultural workshops, virtual cultural exchanges, and telecollaboration projects.

Experiential Learning 

To promote ICC in your ELT classroom, consider implementing transformational experiences such as experiential learning, which encourages students to discover, reflect, and critically analyze what they have experienced. By participating in experiential learning, students gain concrete experience, reflect on this experience, experiment actively, and engage in abstract thinking. After putting their new understanding into practice, students often change their behavior from ethnocentric to intercultural. Experiential learning can include simulations (virtual or face-to-face) where students position themselves in specific situations while maintaining their own identity. Such learning can also include dramatizations and roleplaying scenarios where students adopt a role and behave according to instructions or scripts. To reflect on targeted aspects in these situations, students engage in debates, discussions, and group projects. These opportunities create an experiential learning journey in which students experience living in a foreign culture, albeit virtually. Such activities serve to enhance students’ ICC and to develop their empathy and openness toward differences, both inside and outside their own culture. 

Intercultural Workshops

Intercultural workshops are an effective way for introducing your students to the traits of a targeted culture. Design these classroom-based workshops with activities that guide students in recognizing and describing targeted cultural traits. For example, if the cultural trait is about food, begin the workshop by showing foods from the targeted culture that are generally unknown in your students’ culture (though perhaps available in an ethnic grocery store). Ask students to jot down their initial reaction at seeing these foods (and perhaps also smelling foods if in a face-to-face workshop). Then, encourage students to share their reactions. With curiosity now raised, students view a video clip about these foods and read a short article. Students then work with a partner to interpret a picture or comic strip, and each student pair explains their interpretation to another student pair. The workshop ends with students working in groups to discuss thought-provoking prompts. Such workshops lead students toward reflecting deeply about the targeted cultural trait. Although intercultural workshops can be implemented as stand-alone activities, they are even more effective when used to launch extensive follow-up activities such as virtual cultural exchanges and telecollaboration projects.

Virtual Cultural Exchanges

Many ELT contexts are located geographically far from Anglophone cultures. In such contexts, it is almost impossible to coordinate face-to-face contact with people from the target culture. Although textbooks might include some tasks targetting ICC development, these tasks cannot adequately replicate authentic environments. Fortunately, physical travel is no longer needed for such interactions to occur. Instead, by using digital tools, teachers can replicate cultural exchanges in their classrooms and perhaps also in their students’ homes.

To conduct classroom-based cultural exchanges with meaningful language and cultural learning, have your students interact with students of approximately the same age but in another country and from diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds (Alghasab & Alvarez-Ayure, 2021; Godwin-Jones, 2019). Although these virtual exchanges can serve to develop participants’ linguistic competence, the main purpose is not to focus exclusively on developing language but rather on using language to explore aspects about the participants’ culture and cultural identities. With classroom walls thus extended to the world, these virtual cultural exchanges contribute toward developing students’ ICC.

Telecollaboration Projects

Face-to-face interactions are not always necessary (or realistic) in today’s global, web-connected world. Teachers can effectively support students in building their ICC through telecollaboration projects. As the teacher, your role is essential for ensuring how successfully your students can implement telecollaboration projects (Alghasab & Alvarez-Ayure, 2021). When planning a telecollaboration project for the virtual learning spaces of your classroom, select from among numerous digital resources. Use these digital tools to develop students’ ICC by designing intercultural workshops around cultural topics that are attractive to your students and that can meet the objective of strengthening their ICC. Provide constant monitoring so that your students remain fully engaged while virtually implementing these activites. As you plan and implement telecollaboration projects, keep in mind that the work of the teacher is often more extensive in virtual activities than in face-to-face activities (Godwin-Jones, 2019).

Before actually planning and implementing your telecollaboration project, establish a partnership with a teacher in another country. Although it is not necessary for you to share the same home language with your partner, both of you should have at least one language in common. For example, if you teach English in a Spanish-speaking country, consider partnering with someone who teaches Spanish in an English-speaking country. 

Telecollaboration projects are usually based on an e-tandem model or an intercultural blended model. In these models, students from both countries spend somewhat equal time using each of their shared languages. In the e-tandem model, students meet virtually in pairs or small groups and participate freely in synchronous and asynchronous conversations. In the intercultural blended model, students also meet virtually in pairs or small groups. However, they participate first in synchronous group activities, which are collaboratively planned in advance by teachers and students from both countries, and then in asynchronous activities (such as interacting with partners). Because of its planning phase, the intercultural blended model is very effective for projects with specific learning goals. 

When using the intercultural blended model for your telecollaboration project, work together with your partner teacher in selecting topics that are of interest to students in both countries. One way is for you and your partner to discuss and select topics to be used by your respective students during their telecollaboration interactions. Another way is for each of you to elicit topics from your respective students and then, together, jointly consider topics suggested by your students. Whichever way you take, be sure the selected topic represents cultural aspects and shows promise of promoting discussion and of fostering ICC development.

In collaboration with your partner teacher, plan the synchronous sessions of your project and identify activities for each session. To foster the interaction of students from both countries, create groups of four students—with two from each country. Plan for each telecollaboration session to begin with groupmates participating in different ice-breaker activities so that they can get to know each other better in each subsequent session. After finishing the ice-breaker for a given session, students participate in content-based activities with collaborative work related to the main topic. For example, in a collaborative writing activity, students can work together to design a blog or poster. This can lead to a collaborative speaking activity in the upcoming sessions for which students create a video or radio program. 

Between these synchronous sessions, groupmates maintain contact with each other by doing asynchronous activities. To help students with asynchronously sharing ideas and related information for developing their group’s cultural project, create virtual project spaces on Forum, Facebook, Edmodo classroom, and/or Google classroom. Your telecollaboration project reaches closure when all student groups share their products with the whole class. By describing their respective products and listening to other groups describe their projects, students expand their interculturality and further develop their ICC.

In this chapter, you learned about ELT classrooms as ideal settings to promote interculturality and ICC. Although some textbooks include tasks to enact cultural scenarios, you learned that students can more fully develop their interculturality and ICC by participating in experiential learning, intercultural workshops, virtual cultural exchanges, and telecollaboration projects.

Some key concepts about interculturality and ICC are as follows:

• Interculturality offers the possibility of developing a more open attitude towards all cultures and opportunities to achieve a more reflexive and critical view of reality. 

• Pragmatic competence is essential for becoming interculturally aware. Also vital for intercultural communication is a metacognitive knowledge of linguistics and culture. 

• Although diverse intercultural models exist for understanding one’s own culture and the cultures of other people, Byram´s ICC (Byram et al., 2001) provides the most concrete example of how interculturality can be promoted among students.

• Experiential learning focuses on issues and real-life examples involving critical reflection and discovery.

• Virtual cultural exchanges and intercultural workshops provide intercultural practice.

• Telecollaboration creates virtual opportunities for developing a close relationship with people in other countries and opens a virtual window to critical intercultural awareness. 

Based on your new knowledge about interculturality and ICC, answer these questions:

1. To what extent can your students benefit from participating in interculturally oriented classroom workshops?

2. If you intend to apply a series of interculturally oriented workshops to develop your students’ ICC, what guidelines should you follow when selecting topics?

3. To what extent should you consider your students’ needs and wants when designing ICC workshops? Which of their needs and wants are most important in this ICC process?

To practice what you have learned about interculturality and ICC, do the following:

1. Use recommendations from this chapter to identify your students’ needs and plan activities, utilize materials, and analyze results. 

2. Seek other ways to foster and assess students’ ICC such as observations and portfolios.

3. Analyze progress in promoting your students’ ICC and identify ways to continue advancing.

To expand your knowledge and application of ICC, visit these websites:

• Activities centered on interculturality in ELT classrooms.   https://ppgi.posgrad.ufsc.br/livros/doing-interculturality-in-the-english-classroom  

• Center for Intercultural Dialogue. https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/publications/key-concepts-in-intercultural-dialogue-by-concept/ 

• Portfolios focused on intercultural competence. https://www.coe.int/en/web/autobiography-intercultural-encounters   

• Pragmatic competence. https://corkenglishcollege.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/the-importance-of-developing-pragmatic-competence-in-the-efl-classroom/ 

Intercultural aspects and virtual venues are also addressed by other chapters in this textbook: 

Chapter 2 The Diversity of Global Englishes by L. Barratt

Chapter 11 Using Social Media to Enhance Language Awareness by S. Terol and J. Amarilla

Chapter 15 Exploring Meaning Through Translanguaging Practices by K. Liu and J. Choi

Chapter 16 Incorporating Interjections to Facilitate Conversational Flow by A. Rodomanchenko

Chapter 22 Strengthening Communication Through Classroom Discourse by K. Buckley-Ess

Chapter 24 Teaching in Virtual and Hybrid Classrooms by Yulia Grevtseva and Elena Zyrianova

Chapter 38 A Socio-Cultural Approach to Teaching Grammar by C. Davies, J. Prado, and J. Austin

Chapter 54 Promoting Collaborative Professionalism Among Pre-Service Teachers by D. Pineda

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Fantini, A. E. (2000). A central concern: Developing intercultural competence. CultureWise eLibrary & eBookstore (pp. 25–42). http://www.culturewise.ie/library/books/a-central-concern-developing-intercultural-competence/ 

Godwin-Jones, R. (2019). Telecollaboration as an approach to developing intercultural communication competence. Language Learning & Technology, 23(3), 8–28. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/44691

Kolb, D. A. (2015). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall. 

Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2006.00395_3.x 

Zhou, V., & Pilcher, N. (2019). Revisiting the ‘third space’ in language and intercultural studies. Language & Intercultural Communication, 19(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2018.1553363

Lisseth Rojas-Barreto is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Surcolombiana (Neiva, Colombia), where she directs the ELT master’s program. Lisseth earned a master's degree in language teaching from Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia and a doctorate in education from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Lisseth coordinates the research group Aprender a Aprender (APRENAP) and the research seedbed Research(ing). Her research interests include intercultural language teaching, teacher cognition, internationalization of higher education, and course design and assessment.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4262-9726 

Email for correspondece regarding this chapter: lisseth.rojas@usco.edu.co

Jairo Enrique Castañeda-Trujillo is an assistant professor and researcher in the undergraduate ELT program at the Universidad Surcolombiana (Neiva, Colombia) where he also teaches in the ELT master’s. Jairo earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and English from the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (Colombia), received a master’s in English with emphasis on didactics from the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and pursued a doctorate in education focusing on ELT. Jairo belongs to the APRENAP research group and conducts research on the intersection of pre-service teachers’ identity construction and decolonization in ELT.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3002-7947 

Jhon Eduardo Mosquera Pérez is a teacher educator at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (Tunja, Boyacá). Jhon earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ELT from Universidad Surcolombiana and a master´s degree in learning and teaching processes from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. His research interests entail language assessment, teacher professional development, language teacher identity, English as an international lingua franca, and critical discourse analysis. Jhon is an active presenter at national and international academic events.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4027-3102 

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