Intercultural citizenship education in the English language classroom in Higher Education: Does intercultural citizenship lead to language learning

MELINA PORTO

San Juan

Congreso; 41st FAAPI Conference; 2016

FAAPI y British Council

This paper reports a bilateral university project designed to promote intercultural citizenship and modern language development at the same time and concerned with developing active and responsible citizenship and content-language integrated learning (CLIL) within an ordinary foreign language classroom. The rationale for broadening the scope of language courses and combining them with intercultural citizenship or human rights education rests on the idea that language teaching has instrumental (linguistic-oriented and communicative) purposes as well as educational purposes (development of critical thinking skills, development of the self and of the citizenship dimension) (Byram, 2014a, b) and empirical studies reporting on classroom practice are recently available (Byram, Golubeva, Han & Wagner, in press; Porto, 2014; Porto & Byram, 2015b). These studies have connected both types of education (language and citizenship/human rights) and have demonstrated growth in self/intercultural awareness, criticality and social justice responsibility, as well as the emergence of a sense of community of ?international peers? during the projects. However, the concern remains as to whether this combination leads to language learning and this article addresses this issue.The paper describes one transnational intercultural citizenship project carried out in 2013 during a fourth-month period in the foreign language classroom in Argentina and the UK, designed as a case study, and the research question is ?Does an intercultural citizenship project lead to language learning?? The analysis in this article focuses on data produced by the Argentinian students. The project was located in Higher Education in Argentina, where 76 students were learning English, and in Britain, where 23 students were learning Spanish. It focused on human rights violations during the football World Cup that took place in Argentina in 1978 during a period of military dictatorship. In its four stages (introductory, awareness-raising, dialogue, and citizenship), the project involved students researching about the topic, working collaboratively to design posters to raise awareness of human rights violations and acting on their communities. Conversational and documentary data were analysed qualitatively and comprise recorded Skype conversations, chats in a wiki and Facebook, class discussions, reflection logs and the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (Byram, Barrett, Ipgrave, Jackson, & Méndez García, 2009). Findings show that students found the project motivating, developed critical language awareness, widened their vocabularies and developed plurilingual practices within a translingual orientation.