Troublesome multimodal multiliteracy development for global citizenship in international intercultural exchanges: the MexCo project case study (original) (raw)
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This paper is the result of a participative process in which the students of the Master's Degree " Didactique des Langues " (foreign language didactics) at Université du Maine (Le Mans, France) explored through whole-class activities the field of intercultural dialog and intercultural competence teaching. Our approach to intercultural teaching offers a new point of view: it places intercultural competence in a wider context. We consider it to be beyond encounter and dialog, beyond professional skills, and instead an intercultural action: living, accepting and creating together. As Byram (2008) emphasizes, the development of intercultural competence has to lead to a critical cultural awareness of oneself as a citizen. My thesis is that teachers and students who work with their own cultural biography, who keep the social dimension in their minds, can through intercultural competence cause changes in society. We will try to prove that a culture of a given society does not consist, as Descombes states, of whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members (Descombes, 1995), Rather, this acceptable manner takes on a new perspective in language teaching. Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but through the construction of habits, viewpoints, and beliefs from which people construct strategies of action. Mill (1990) suggests that it is important when different ways of living exist, just as it is useful when different opinions are expressed, that different characters should be allowed enough latitude, provided that they do not harm one another.
Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2023
The Handbook edited by Jane Jackson has been released in contemporary and transnational times where interculturality-related challenges continue to emerge. Some of these challenges include "the rise in populism, elevated fear of difference, and heightened anti-immigration sentiments" (Jackson, 2020, p. 1) and may, to varying degrees, influence individuals' lives and well-being. To tackle these issues and foster greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in intercultural communication and research practices, the Handbook presents 34 chapters to introduce interdisciplinary studies of language and intercultural communication for senior undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars from multidisciplinary backgrounds (e.g., language education, anthropology, sociology, business, tourism) who are interested in language and intercultural communication research. Each chapter not only critically assesses field-specific theories and research methods, but also discusses practical recommendations and future directions for conducting research. The Handbook categorizes chapters into five parts. Part I, 'Foundations of language and intercultural communication studies', contains five chapters mainly reviewing the (re)conceptualizations of language and intercultural communication research, with a particular focus on historical developments across the globe (Chapter 1), culture and power (Chapter 2), identity and communication (Chapter 3), intercultural competence and citizenship (Chapter 4), and criticality and reflexivity (Chapter 5). Part II, 'Core themes and issues', shares a similar theoretical orientation with 14 chapters structured under three themes to discuss the relationships between language and other constructs such as culture, identity, and global citizenship education. Diverging slightly in focus, Part III, 'Theory into practice: Towards intercultural (communicative) competence and citizenship', looks at some important practices such as intercultural education for second language teachers (Chapter 20), intercultural responsibility and glocal critical citizenship (Chapter 21), digitally mediated development of intercultural competence (Chapter 22), equity-and diversity-focused global citizenship education (Chapter 23), and intercultural learning assessment (Chapter 24). Exemplifying interdisciplinary approaches, Part IV, 'Language and intercultural communication in context', provides diverse contexts in which intercultural communication takes place, such as international education (Chapters 25, 26, & 27), business education (Chapter 28), workplace (Chapters 29 & 30), health services (Chapter 31), legal discourse (Chapter 32), and tourism (Chapter 33). Finally, Part V, 'New debates and future directions', includes a closing chapter (i.e., Chapter 34) synthesizing ongoing debates and highlighting the need to strengthen socially just research and practical efforts so as to promote interculturality across public and private domains. This edited volume possesses several strengths. An important aspect is that all chapters exhibit a high level of criticality and reflexivity. Chapter 5, for example, explains the interconnectedness between these two notions and increases the visibility
Communication, discourses and interculturality
Language and Intercultural Communication, 2010
Communication, discourses and interculturality Communication is generally realised through social action in the form of interpersonal discourse. Social action can make implicit and/or explicit claims about the various associated, and perhaps conflicting, collectivities to which those involved in a given communicative event are affiliated (cf. Scollon & Scollon, 2001). However, a substantial amount of commercially produced literature in the field of crosscultural communication (CCC) and inter-cultural communication (ICC; much aimed at students in higher education) inclines towards the formulaic or rhetorical, tending to be reductionist, essentialist (Holliday, Hyde, & Kullman, 2004) and simplistic; and is often based on a priori (yet unjustified and unjustifiable) assumptions of 'cultural' difference (Piller, 2007). There is, then, in much of the literature available to students of ICC or CCC a tendency to ignore the inherent complexity of interdiscourse communication and the concomitantly critical issue of context (see, for example, Goodwin & Duranti, 1992). This special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication (LAIC) has its origins in a colloquium of the same name which we convened for the 41st annual meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (for which the above statements largely constituted the thematic call to participants). The colloquium brought together a group of researcher-educators with an interest in interculturality and interdiscourse communication. All share, to some degree, dissatisfaction with currently prevailing models of ICC applied in higher education, especially regarding training and research in ICC aimed at students in the field. The colloquium proposed a series of papers to consider interdiscourse communication from a range of positions, with the specific aim of considering ways in which interaction informs, shapes and reflects the (social and cultural) make-up of discourse participants, in different contexts, the complex nature of which might be summarised as the 'Other is in Us and we are in the Other' (Kramsch, 2001, p. 205). In particular, we are interested in contributing to the debate on interculturality as realised through interdiscourse interaction. Interculturality is seen here as a dynamic process by which people draw on and use the resources and processes of cultures with which they are familiar but also those they may not typically be associated with in their interactions with others. This may mean that people implicitly question aspects of their own and each other's cultures, but can also lead to innovation and the adoption and adaptation of features derived from other cultural contexts. 1 Thus, we aim to redress the imbalance frequently located in notions of language and cultural categorisation that view these as coterminous in CCC and ICC literature. This issue appears at a time when the study of CCC and ICC is a rapidly expanding field, in the UK. This is evidenced by the increasing number of CCC and ICC programmes being offered at universities in Britain. Since 2000 the number of modules and courses now available at UK institutions of higher education has expanded exponentially. 2 Much of the motivation for this relates to the rise in
VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, 2019
This paper is aimed at reexamining intercultural communication from an identity social constructionist perspective and offering a linguistically-based research framework. The social constructionist approach holds that knowledge and reality are constructed through discourse, interactions and/or social interchange. This study maintains that language in action as communication in general serves dual purposes. It does not only build the social world, but also constructs identity - a critical issue in our global community recognized by many scholars (as most recently as Jandt, 2016; Fukuyama, 2018). Identity, though, is not just a social construct, but can operate as part of the purpose of communication as well. Recognizing that it is difficult to find clearly-defined methodologies in interdisciplinary areas such as intercultural communication (IC), this study proposes a research framework, grounded in pragmatic theory, and taking speech acts as the basic unit of analysis. The paper also...
Curricular Insights into Translingualism as a Communicative Competence
Translingual communicative competence remains underreported within recent research on multilingualism and plurilingualism. The outcomes of the MULTICOM curriculum development project, a European thematic network in multilingual communication aimed at providing university students with the translingual and transcultural skills needed to operate effectively at an international professional level, provide insights into the profile of translingualism as a communicative competence. The teaching and learning materials created to accompany the proposed curriculum framework reveal a significant departure from academic traditions in which language teaching has tended to neglect translingualism and the impact of multilingual settings in the interpretation of information. As discussed throughout the paper, rethinking the purpose of tasks and materials allows for awareness training, without which translingual communicative competence cannot be achieved. However, the implementation of an ecology-of-language approach to enhance plurilingualism and pluriculturalism requires rethinking the strategies that make for successful communication in multilingual settings and the definition of a translingual CEF in which partial competence and semilingualism is addressed.
Intercultural Communication From an Interdisciplinary Perspective
2011
The need for effective communication among the people of the world has never been more pressing than it is at the start of the 21st century in this post-911 world. Recent breakthroughs in the fields of transportation, computing and telecommunications have combined to increase the ease and frequency of communication among members of different cultures. At the same time, developments in world politics have made the need for meaningful communication among different people a necessity for the survival of everyone on the planet. This paper describes a course that prepares students for global citizenship. The course helps students develop an informed understanding of global challenges and the skills to address those challenges. The paper offers specific teaching strategies and assignments that can be adapted to many disciplines.
This paper reports on MexCo (Mexico-Coventry), an ongoing online intercultural learning project underpinned by action research. Its aim is to embed internationalisation into the curriculum of the institutions involved in order to promote citizenship competences, online intercultural communicative competence in particular, among both students and staff. The integration of telecollaboration into the curriculum has highlighted problematic aspects of the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), such as cyberpragmatics (Yus, 2011). Cyberpragmatics is intended here as the skill of understanding others' intended meanings in computer-mediated communication. It is suggested that cyberpragmatics in online intercultural learning exchanges is a 'Threshold Concept' (TC) (Meyer & Land, 2005, p. 375), i.e. a key concept that is troublesome to understand as it is challenging to the identity of the learner, but which could open new learning horizons to the students who do manage to grasp it.