The cultural and intercultural dimensions of language teaching:

current practice and prospects

Jean-Claude Beacco
University of Paris III Sorbonne nouvelle

Whereas access to languages (classical and modern) was long regarded as an excellent
form of personal development (humanism of works/texts and humanism of educational
travel), nowadays cultural dimensions need to be, as it were, re-integrated into foreign
language teaching. With increased possibilities for contact, we should now think in terms of a
kind of humanism of encounters, both real and virtual. The aim of intercultural education
(IE), which cannot be dissociated from plurilingual education, is to continue these traditions
while adapting them to the contemporary world and the classroom context.

The results of the survey conducted in the 10 countries taking part in this seminar show IE to
be the poor relation:

- the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, yet to be widely distributed;

- activities of the early language learning type are conducted in primary education
but then disappear from the curriculum;
- IE is regarded as an effect of the teaching of subjects in foreign languages (CLIL-
EMILE type), but the benefits are seldom described in detail;
- an element of awareness-raising about the internal diversity of languages is present
in some curricula and may help to heighten perception of the importance of IE
(Sweden, Luxembourg, teaching of Arabic in France);
- IE is often interpreted in terms of a comparison between societies, but this drawing
of parallels does not necessarily lead to educational questioning (see below).

This is because language teaching may tend to be limited to functional goals

(communicating in order to do) and hence to play down the importance of such goals as
communicating in order to learn or communicating in order to understand (the world). In
concrete terms, it seems that language teaching tends to put cultural/intercultural education
in the service of language learning. Priority is given to:

- lexical teaching, based on simplistic theories of the type: a language = a world

view = a culture;
- the provision of knowledge by the teacher (or the textbook) about the societies in
which the target language is used: auto- and heterostereotypes, psychology of
peoples, traditions and modern folklore, everyday life etc. To save time, this
knowledge/information tends to take the form of compact generalisations which
reduce internal differences, in other words a countrys cultural diversity (Young
people are, think, do), because a nation-state is a political and not a cultural
entity (as ethnic groups, which are also constructs, claim to be);
- the knowledge imparted is often of an ordinary nature with little input from the
human and social sciences.

1
This resistance is mainly attributable to issues of disciplinary (professional) identity, IE being
perceived as a foreign body or as an obstacle to the transmission of specific knowledge
which it is thought necessary to have about the target societies, to which debates on
general topics (eg for or against nuclear power) are preferred.

IE does indeed suffer from a lack of integration because it came into being outside language
teaching and, to some extent, outside the founding perspective of plurilingual education. IE
is, by definition, transversal to all school subjects (eg history or philosophy, see Council of
Europe White Paper) and can be the subject of activities in a specific class (eg education for
citizenship), itself becoming a subject. The main problem arising with regard to it is
therefore not one of transversality/convergence, but that of its place in language courses. Its
presence is not only desirable for generic reasons or reasons of symmetry, but because IE
constitutes a key aspect of language teaching: to learn an unfamiliar language is, in a very
strong sense, to discover others because, in so doing, we learn about linguistic otherness
(even if only provisionally and reversibly).

If interculturally-oriented activities are to be built into language courses, it is important they

should be precisely specified in the curriculum. However, we are faced with a profusion of
terms (cultural, intercultural, pluricultural, socio-cultural, altercultural etc), which admittedly
reflects a concern for better understanding of the concept but which continues to allow
scope for multiple interpretations, including the most simplistic (intercultural = comparison
of societies). For its part, the Guide for the development and implementation of curricula for
plurilingual and intercultural education suggests the following definitions (p. 16):

Pluriculturality is the desire and ability to identify with several cultures, and participate in
them. Interculturality is the ability to experience another culture and analyse that
experience. The intercultural competence acquired from doing this helps individuals to
understand cultural difference better, establish cognitive and affective links between past
and future experiences of that difference, mediate between members of two (or more) social
groups and their cultures, and question the assumptions of their own cultural group and
milieu.

Pluriculturalism - identification with two (or more) social groups and their cultures and
interculturality the competences for critical awareness of other cultures may complement
each other: active discovery of one or more other cultures may help learners to develop
intercultural competence.1

It might be argued that the ability to participate in different cultures depends on intercultural
experiences handled in a detached and open-minded manner. In any event, curricula must
propose a definition of IE.

For my part, I maintain that IE is a learning tool designed to develop open, proactive,
reflective and critical attitudes in language teaching so that learners learn how to learn
positively and how to derive benefit from all forms of contact with otherness. It aims to
develop curiosity about discovery and a personal, attentive and benevolent approach to
cultural diversity, because it seeks to soften ego/ethnocentric attitudes. It is therefore based
on a plural and dynamic view of cultural and social identity.

IEs priority where curricula and teacher training are concerned is therefore to restore the
learner as a social being to a central position and no longer to focus exclusively on
societal/cultural knowledge to be acquired and reproduced (which, to a great extent, is part
of general culture). IE assumes responsibility for changing ego/ethnocentric attitudes,
steering learners towards forms of curiosity and tolerance about that which is different and
getting them to regard this as a possible contribution to personal development.

1
See M. Byram (2009): Multicultural societies, pluricultural people and the project of intercultural education, on the
Platform of resources and references for plurilingual and intercultural education

2
The development of IE requires consideration of the nature of the different forms of contact
with manifestations of otherness. These contacts may be real, with, accordingly, possibilities
for interaction (behavioural adaptations, verbal and emotional responses) and with direct
implications and high personal stakes. Contacts may also be virtual (via the media) and
indirect, produce only possibilities for verbal responses (and few behavioural responses) and
raise, in theory, non-implicating personal issues. This is generally the situation in the
classroom: there, we only observe verbalisations, and then only if the learners feel
implicated by contact consisting of texts and images. These verbal responses on the part of
learners, elicited by multiple encounters, which may be unforced (random access to the
media in connection with current events) or organised in accordance with various systematic
approaches, are the subject-matter which will be treated in the classroom.

Another of the conditions for implementing IE is to take into account the existence of internal
experiences of otherness, those specific to the individuals own social space, which call on
(cognitive?) knowledge and skills and which are conventionally termed cultural (actually
intracultural). But in that space there is also otherness from elsewhere, which is
considered as part of intercultural experience (actually also extracultural), comparable
with internal experience, even if it no doubt brings into play other resources in terms of
knowledge/references and the nature of the competences involved. It is probably preferable
to start out from the ability to interpret and respond in ones own social, cultural and
linguistic space and move towards analysis of experiences of a more external/foreign
otherness.

Classroom activities implementing IE thus have the following functions:

building encounters with other societies in which the languages in question are used,
as opportunities for discovery and for inputs of knowledge and information;
eliciting responses (expressed verbally) to those discoveries;
managing learners responses to those discoveries.

By management we mean:

helping learners to progress from spontaneous responses (no doubt based on social
and emotional representations) to controlled and thought-out responses;
first making a detour via the internal/indigenous interpretations, which should be
made known to learners or, better, which they should be asked to reconstitute (where
possible), and then moving on to external personal responses as interested
foreigners, again with possible emotional dimensions.

In addition, these activities may be diversified because:

internal interpretations may fall within the ambit of personal accounts, media
analyses or the social and human sciences
learners responses may be individual (Autobiography of intercultural
encounters) and fall within the ambit of activities which may be autonomous,
semi-autonomous, or interactive and negotiated, which does not rule out forms of
collaborative autonomy (as part of educational projects);
they may be expressed in the language being learnt. But to enable them to be fully
implemented, language teachers should no doubt also be made aware of the
usefulness (for these specific activities only) of separating teaching of the
language from teaching of the culture because, for example, at levels A1-A2-B1,
learners may consider themselves unable to express what they feel or think
exclusively in the target language;
they should be conceived in relation to the other subjects;

3
 they should be calibrated to the learners cognitive, social and emotional
development.

IE is therefore not limited to comparisons or the drawing of parallels, with learners as

consumers of information supplied to them or deriving from their personal experience. The
question thus arises of the origin and status of knowledge, particularly as regards the
society of origin. However that may be, a tertium comparationis is needed to serve as a
descriptive/analytical framework for the comparison (national dishes and the anthropology of
food) and to give it meaning while avoiding folklorisation.

The concept of cultural/intercultural competence may also be used to organise these

activities and build some form of progression into them in language classes. This might mean
that priority should be given to objectives specified in terms of descriptors of cultural and
intercultural competences (as the ability to understand and interpret ones own social
environment or societies of which one has little or no knowledge). This therefore involves
specifying the excessively broad existential competence of the CEFR by using, for example,
the available frameworks of reference for cultural/intercultural competences (M Bennet and
his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, the CARAP, the typologies of M Byram
and J-C Beacco, and so on) set out by typological category and sometimes by level.

The fields in which IE can be implemented are many and varied and should be selected
according to the educational context. However, some are closer to language teaching. They
fall within the scope of linguistic anthropology (e.g. value of silence, verbal virtuosity and
poetic forms, etc.), ethnolinguistics and all the comparative/contrastive analyses of discourse
forms and languages, including analysis of enunciative operations (representations of
quantification, of space/time, etc.), but also the characteristics of communication
communities: names of language acts (e.g. names of feelings), discourse types (names,
formats, characteristics), polite forms of words, etc.. Because mastering a new language also
means entering another world of discourse. This applies first and foremost to linguistic
benevolence (as opposed to verbal violence), the precondition for living together
democratically (for teaching this in classroom discussions; see Byram, Gribovka & Starkey:
Developing the intercultural dimension of language teaching).

In short, Plurilingual and Intercultural Education should lead teachers not to be concerned
solely with encouraging learners to speak, so that they speak the foreign language better,
but also, this time, to give serious consideration to what they actually say.

Text presented at the

Seminar on Curriculum convergences for plurilingual and intercultural education
Strasbourg, 29-30 November 2011
www.coe.int/lang