Teachers' awareness about intercultural competence in teaching socioculture in SFL

MARÍA ISABEL POZZO

Tucson

Congreso; IV International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence; 2014

Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy. University of Arizona

Research on intercultural competence has been specially devoted to students. However, it is of great importance to evaluate teachers´ intercultural competence, since they are -precisely- the ones in charge to develop it among their students. The reflection is particularly necessary in the case of native teachers, for whom the language they teach is their own mother tongue, totally familiar to them. This interest is even greater when teaching sociocultural contents with the depth of the Humanistic disciplines (Literature, History, Geography, Citizenship Training) and has to be taught by specialist, without linguistic nor metalinguistic training. In teaching Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) with academic purposes, the disciplinar knowledge required is much more than what a language teacher can face, and therefore specialists have to join and form a team. In this paper we deal with history teachers´ intercultural competence when teaching sociocultural contents of SFL to non Spanish speaking students. To do so, we implemented a cuasiexperimental design structured around an Argentina´s History course for SFL students in the city of Rosario, Argentina. The course ?which lasted two months- was in charge of a numerous group of teachers in pre-service education and in-service (newly graduated and experimented). They voluntarily participated, and were selected by professors of the University College where they studied according to their good performance as students and their willigness to assume the experience as a professional development opportunity. Each class was dictated by a different teacher -sometimes in small groups- and was totally videotaped. In our whole research project, the evaluation comprises preactive, active and post active teaching moments (Jackson, 1991). In this presentation, we focus on the results obtained in the last one, through teachers´ own perceptions. Methodologically, data collection was carried out through a written individual self-evaluation, in which teachers expressed which their successes and miscalculations were from their own point of view about the class they dictated. From the qualitative analysis of their expressions, intercultural competence indicators were revealed. They were then compared with the variables related to intercultural competence according to specialized bibliography in order to conclude which aspects should be foster in teacher training to achieve a thorough development of this competence.