Textual Resources and Activities Used by Norwegian EFL Teachers to Promote Intercultural Communicative Competence

• In Event: Exclusion, inclusion and the possibility of intercultural communication in contemporary Europe: Second and Foreign Language education for established and newly arrived migrant students

Proposal

Abstract for the CIES conference 2017:

Problematizing (In)Equality: The Promise of Comparative and International Education


Purpose

The proposed paper focuses on the following research question: What textual resources and activities do English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers use to promote intercultural communicative competence? A particular focus will be on how, or if literature is used to raise intercultural competence. The paper can be linked to the sub-themes of problematizing teaching and learning and exclusion/inclusion.

In their summing up of international trends within research on foreign language didactics, Haukås and Thue Vold (2012) maintain that there is an increasing trend to address empiricism and experiences from the classroom. I intend to contribute to this growing trend. As of yet, there is little research on empiricism and classroom experiences of intercultural learning in the Norwegian L2 classroom. We need to know more about teachers’ efforts to enhance their pupils’ intercultural competence. International research on the teaching and attitudes of language teachers shows that these, to a large extent, reflect traditional approaches to teaching Culture with a capital C, such as the literary canon, in addition to facts, rather than efforts to develop intercultural competence (East, 2012; Young & Sachdev, 2011; Sercu, 2005; Castro, Sercu, & Mendez Garcia, 2004). Swedish research indicates that the situation is similar (Svensson, 2015) and there is a need for more research to establish what the situation is like in Norway. Both the general part of national curriculum and several objectives in the English subject curriculum support a focus on intercultural competence. However, the term itself is not used, and the way the objectives are worded might easily lead to a focus on knowledge about cultures, rather than intercultural competence.

According to the Norwegian curriculum pupils should be able to “express and justify own opinions about different topics” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2013, p. 2). I am interested to learn to what extent activities challenging pupils’ opinions and biases and aiming at seeing other perspectives are used. Are the pupils given opportunities to construct knowledge in a dialogue with their peers and with the teacher as a mediator, or does, perhaps, the teacher provide them with the “correct” answers?

Methods

The Norwegian national curriculum outlines the purpose for each subject and a set of competence aims. Through a questionnaire, I will uncover which activities and textual resources 10 EFL teachers at lower secondary level use in their attempts to promote “understanding and respect between persons with different cultural backgrounds” (Ministry of Education and Research, p. 2) as is set out in the national curriculum of English in Norway. In-depth interviews with four of these teachers will probe questions concerning how they work with the main subject area of the English subject “Culture, Society and Literature”, and how they justify their choices.

Then I will observe four classes where the focus is on culture to form an impression of how activities are carried out, and whether there is a difference between what the teachers say they do and what they actually do. I will analyse how teachers formulate questions and the wording of written tasks, e.g. if closed or open-ended questions are used.

The questionnaire will give information as to which activities are used, whereas the in-depth interviews and observation of classes will show how the activities are executed and reveal the teachers’ attitudes to and understanding of intercultural competence.

Significance

There has been little research in Norway on how the afore-mentioned aims of the national curriculum are reflected in the teaching of English, and of the activities and textual resources used to develop intercultural competence. My starting point is to learn more about how teachers of English work on developing intercultural communicative competence. This entails considering how learning resources are included in the activities taking place in school, which will be followed up by studying how a different approach to work with literature and intercultural questions might affect pupils’ intercultural competence.

Several studies investigate methods to develop intercultural competence, and some focus on how literature can be utilised. However, there are few studies that explore how literature is used to enhance pupils’ intercultural competence (Lee, 2014).

It would be of interest to discuss the following questions: 1) How teachers use literature to enhance pupils’ intercultural competence, and 2) The importance of teachers’ language in creating and carrying out classroom activities to enhance intercultural competence.

References:

Castro, P., Sercu, L., & Mendez Garcia, M. (2004). Integrating Language-and-Culture Teaching. An Investigation of Spanish Teachers' Perceptions of the Objectives of Foreign Language Education. Intercultural Education, pp. 91-104.

East, M. (2012). Addressing the Intercultural via Task-based Language Teaching: Possibility or Problem? Language and Intercultural Communication, pp. 56-73.

Haukås, Å., & Thue Vold, E. (2012). Internasjonale trender innen fremmedspråksdidaktisk forskning. Norsk Pedagogisk Tidsskrift, 386-401.

Lee, L.F. (2013). Taiwanese Adolescents Reading American Young Adult Literature: A Reader Response Study in Bland, J. and Lütge, G. Children’s Literature in Second Language Education, pp. 139-150.

Ministry of Education and Research. (2013). Utdanningsdirektoratet. Retrieved 31.1., 2015, from Læreplanen i engelsk: http://www.udir.no/kl06/ENG1-03/

Sercu, L. (2005). Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence: An International Investigation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Svensson, F. (2015). Language and Culture: A Study about the Relationship between Postcolonial Literature and Intercultural Competence in the EFL Classroom. Växjö: Linnæus University

Young, T. J., & Sachdev, I. (2011). Intercultural Communicative Competence: Exploring English Language Teachers' Beliefs and Practices. Language Awareness, pp. 81-98.

Author

• Sissil Lea Heggernes, Oslo and Akershus University College