Joe's Laundry: Using Critical Incidents to Develop Intercultural and Foreign Language Competence in Study Abroad and Beyond (original) (raw)

The development of intercultural competence and foreign language skills in study abroad and the foreign language (FL) classroom is often seen as an either/or proposition due to lack of time, training or the availability of materials in the target language. The Critical Incident method (CI) provides an example of an intercultural training tool that can link these competencies in ways that are developmentally appropriate for the FL and IC levels of the students. This method uses authentic intercultural mishaps to develop critical thinking skills as students reflect on the cultural values and attitudes underlying the experience. Drawing on research in study abroad FL pedagogy, this paper describes the CI method, provides a review of best practices in the context of study abroad, and develops an example of a CI from a study abroad program in France to illustrate how cultural incidents can be used to promote both intercultural and foreign language competence. Almost anyone who has crossed cultures either at home or abroad has stories to tell about missteps that can be funny, sad, embarrassing, upsetting, frustrating or sometimes even exhilarating. Intercultural trainers refer to these cultural misunderstandings as "critical incidents" or CI. Although critical incidents have their origin in a technique developed by psychologists (Flanagan, 1954), by the 1960s, interculturalists charged with training Peace Corps volunteers for their international assignments, had begun to collect the various stories brought back by volunteers and to use them as the starting point for discussions about how to effectively navigate other cultures (Wight, 1967). The incidents were described and then analyzed to learn why it happened, what could have been done differently, and what volunteers would need to know in the future in order not to repeat the same mistakes. Since then, cultural incidents have become a standard component of the intercultural toolkit, and are regularly included in classes, workshops, all phases of study abroad, and other contexts where building intercultural competence is an explicit goal. Critical incidents can be especially effective intercultural training tools because they grow out of the student's own experiences, are therefore personal, authentic encounters, often emotionally charged, and highly relevant to the specific situation in which the student finds him or herself. They can also be adapted to many different formats for discussion, role plays, mini case studies, reflective essay assignments, and cultural assimilations, among others. Despite these many advantages, the CI method rarely finds its way into foreign language (FL) instruction for a variety of reasons such as