Intercultural competence in practice and beyond

MELINA PORTO

Río de Janeiro

Congreso; 2017 AILA World Congress, Asociación Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada.; 2017

Asociación Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada.

In this presentation I will illustrate the concept of ?intercultural competence? in practice with a project about peace, designed as a case study and carried out in an Argentine primary state school during the second grade English lessons in 2011. Thirty boys and girls aged eight with a beginner level of English (A1 in the Common European Framework of Reference) took part. Data comprise posters for peace and task sheets produced by the students and reflection logs written by the teacher, which were analysed qualitatively. I will show the saviors in Byram?s (1997) model at work in the project and I will illustrate with student samples. I will also focus upon recent developments in the theory of intercultural competence that have led to the notion of ?intercultural citizenship in the foreign language classroom? (Byram, 2012, 2014a,b; Byram, Golubeva, Han & Wagner, forthcoming). I will describe this theory, which proposes that the aims and objectives of foreign language teaching can and should be combined with those of education for citizenship. Building on the project about peace, I will illustrate ?intercultural citizenship? in practice.