Moving From Communicative Competence to Intercultural Communicative Competence: Working With MA TESOL and TFL Students

1. Moving From Communicative Competence to Intercultural Communicative Competence: Working With MA TESOL and TFL Students Dr. Lynn Goldstein Monterey Institute of International Studies, A Graduate School of Middlebury College CERCLL Tucson, Arizona January 25, 2014

2. Communicative Competence vs.Intercultural Competence Communicative Competence (Canale, 1983) “The theoretical framework for communicative competence proposed here minimally includes four areas of knowledge and skill: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.”

3. Communicative Competence vs.Intercultural Competence Communicative Competence (Canale, 1983) • Grammatical Competence: “Mastery of the language code itself” • Sociolinguistic Competence: “Utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction.” • Discourse Competence: “Mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken and written text in different genres…Unity of text is achieved through cohesion in form and coherence in meaning.” • Strategic: “Mastery of verbal and nonverbal communication strategies…to compensate for communication breakdowns due to limiting conditions or insufficient competence… and to enhance the effectiveness of communication.”

4. Intercultural Competence Intercultural Awareness (Baker, 2012) • For effective communication, learners should know more than syntax, lexis, and phonology. • Importance of how to use “linguistic and other communicative resources in the negotiation of meaning, roles, and relationships in the diverse sociocultural settings of intercultural settings of intercultural communication through English.” • Skills of multilingual communicators: • “Role of accommodation in adapting language to be closer to that of one’s interlocutor in order to aid understanding and solidarity.” • “Negotiation and mediation skills are also key, particularly between different culturally based frames of reference, which have the potential to cause misunderstanding or miscommunication.” These skills enable interlocutors to “adjust and align themselves to different communicative systems and cooperate in communication”

5. Intercultural Competence (Byram, 1998) • Attitudes: “Curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one's own.” • Knowledge: “of social groups and their products and practices in one's own and in one's interlocutor's country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction.” • Skills of interpreting and relating: “Ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one's own.” • Skills of discovery and interaction: “Ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction.” • Critical cultural awareness/political education: “An ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one's own and other cultures and countries.”

6. Transcultural Competence (Slimbach, 2005) 6 Categories of Competence • Perspective consciousness: “The ability to question constantly the source of one’s cultural assumptions and ethical judgments, leading to the habit of seeing things through the minds and hearts of others.” • Ethnographic skill:“The ability to observe carefully social behavior, manage stress, and establish friendships across cultures, while exploring issues of global significance, documenting learning, and analyzing data using relevant concepts.” • Global awareness: “A basic awareness of transnational conditions and systems, ideologies and institutions, affecting the quality of life of human and non-human populations, along with the choices confronting individuals and nations.”

7. Transcultural Competence (Slimbach, 2005) • World learning: “Direct experience with contrasting political histories, family lifestyles, social groups, arts, religions, and cultural orientations based on extensive, immersed interaction within non-English speaking, non-Americanized environments.” • Foreign language proficiency: “A threshold-level facility in the spoken, non-verbal, and written communication system used by members of at least one other culture.” • Affective development: “The capacity to demonstrate personal qualities and standards “of the heart” (e.g., empathy, inquisitiveness, initiative, flexibility, humility, sincerity, gentleness, justice, and joy) within specific intercultural contexts in which one is living and learning.”

8. COMPARING CC to ICC A scene from “Japanese Story”

9. What does it mean to develop and “possess” Intercultural Communicative Competence ? Attitudes, Knowledge, & Skills • Understand that language and culture and the interactions between them are situated and variable, that intercultural interactions need to be ethical, and understand the roles power and its distribution play in intercultural interactions. • Gain linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand and interact effectively in multilingual/multicultural settings. • Develop an understanding of the roles linguistic and cultural attitudes play in interactions across multilingual and multicultural settings and how they influence the success of such interactions.

10. What does it mean to develop and “possess” ICC? Attitudes, Knowledge, & Skills • Develop the awareness needed to successfully participate in multilingual/multicultural interactions. This addresses not only the knowledge and attitudes discussed above but also how communication/interaction is structured across cultures and languages, how communication is monitored while in interaction, and what factors support or hinder successful interactions. • Develop "tools"for understanding their own and others' ways of interacting in order to be able to participate effectively in multilingual/multicultural interactions across a range of languages and cultures.

11. How to Achieve These Goals • Course content • Readings • Activities • Assignments: • Blogs • Other Group Analysis • Professional Needs Analysis

12. Course Content/Topics

16. Activities: Personal, Experiential, Visual, Tangible, Comparative, and Real World • Personal:Cultural History and Repertoire • Experiential:Alpha versus Omega: (Ting-Toomey and Chung) • Visual:Sleeping Babies (DIE); Stereotypes; Written Artifacts

17. Activities: Personal, Experiential, Visual, Tangible, Comparative and Real World • Tangible: • Good Will Huntinghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnZ0Y4rvz6E&feature=related • Pushpaka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW5BeHNF-e0&wide=1) • Japanese Story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIQH_msbZ2o • Real World:Visa applications, Healthcare on the border

18. Assignments • Blog Sample All observation posts should include the following information: • Who the participants are: Their relationship to each other (relative status, degree of solidarity, degree of intimacy), approximate age, gender, race, ethnicity if known, native language if known, language of the interaction. • Purpose of the Interaction: For example— checking books out of the library, ordering/serving a hamburger, asking for/giving directions, making plans, asking for/offering assistance and so forth. Observe an interaction between participants from different groups(age, gender, socio economic status, occupation, status, religion, expertise, and knowledge, field of study): Observe to see if the participants interact in ways that signal their solidarity, intimacy, and/or their perceptions of higher or lower status, or more or less power. What aspects of the interaction led you to believe that the participants were enacting solidarity, intimacy, status and/or power through language?

19. Assignments Other Group Analysis • The goal of this assignment is to observe and analyze an entirely unknown discourse event. • Attend an event (social, religious, educational, sporting, civic, and so forth) you have never attended before in a culture different from your own /culture you are unfamiliar with. Note that I am using culture broadly here—it could be religious, occupational, sports, social, avocational and so forth. You could go to a religious service different from your own, attend a sports event of a type you have never attended/watched, go birding having never done so before, go surfing, take a cooking class, go to a Board of Education meeting, a Rotary club meeting, a city council meeting—use your imagination. Please make sure to get permission to observe (unless it is a public venue to which all are welcome). You can let your contact person know that you are doing an assignment to observe a setting you have never been in before.

20. Assignments Professional Needs Analysis • Step One: For this project you will locate participants (3 people if you are taking the class for 3 units, 5 people if you are taking the class for 4 units) to interview who are currently working in your professional field, i.e., people who are ESL or EFL teachers, or foreign language teachers of your FL, or interpreters or translators, or involved in international business, or involved in policy/ policy administration, or involved in international education management. All should be in job settings where they regularly interact with people from different language and cultural backgrounds. • Step Five: Summarize your participants’ views, including where they are similar and different, in response to all of the above questions, regarding working with people with diverse language and cultural backgrounds. • Step Six: Given your participants’ answers that you have addressed in steps 3-5, consider (1) what they already “possess” in terms of the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed for successful, ethical, intercultural interactions in their work place and (2) what they need to learn to be more interculturally competent. In doing so, bring in the pertinent concepts, constructs and literature from our course and readings as the lenses through which you decide what they already believe/ know/can do and what they need to develop in terms of beliefs/attitudes, knowledge and skills. • Step Seven: Given your analyses in step six, identify and justify the topics, readings, and activities you would engage your participants in to develop ethical, sound intercultural attitudes, develop their knowledge of intercultural communication in ways that will lead to successful, ethical intercultural interactions in their work place, and develop the skills and practices needed for successful, ethical intercultural interactions in their workplace.