Presented By Bob Dignen, Rudi Camerer, Judith Mader, Julio Torres, Peter Grundy

Session Details

It's widely agreed that today's language learners will use the English they learn to represent themselves and to communicate with both native and non‑native speakers on the internet and, in many cases, in face to face interaction. For these reasons, it's no longer appropriate to learn English merely as a 'foreign' language for use on visits to English speaking countries. However, exactly how to achieve the intercultural competence at which twenty‑first century learners and users aim is uncertain. Hence this symposium, in which each speaker will offer their own definition of intercultural competence and will explore a range of issues, for the most part in materials‑ or data‑driven workshop format.

Our first speaker, Bob Dignen, director of York Associates, delivers intercultural seminars and international team training. His session provides a critical introduction to his new book 50 Ways to Improve your Intercultural Skills in English and to the key intercultural competences which he and his co‑author identify.

Continuing this practical perspective, Rudi Camerer and Judith Mader of European Language Competence, Frankfurt, offer practical examples of how learners may be prepared to use (international) English appropriately in a variety of intercultural encounters, and how their competence may be assessed. Rudi focuses in particular on the methods used in available IC‑training materials and on the descriptors of intercultural competence incorporated in the CEF. Judith, also wearing her Frankfurt School of Finance and Management hat, discusses how the ICE (Intercultural Competence in English) test approaches a notion as apparently untestable as intercultural competence, making use of video and written examples of candidate performance in order to determine appropriate evaluation criteria.

Turning from student instruction and performance to teacher understanding and preparation, Julio Torres, University of Birmingham, shares some of the autobiographical account and interview data that he's collected from teachers, and argues that as teachers we need to understand culture and interculturality in a more critical way. Finally, Peter Grundy, Northumbria University, shows how the role of English native speakers in intercultural communication is often problematic for themselves and their interlocutors and raises questions about whose English is most appropriate in intercultural communication.

After each presentation there will be a brief opportunity to ask a clarificatory question or make a first comment. The final part of the symposium will be given over to participant discussion.

About Bob Dignen

In this section of our page, depending on the speaker, you may find (a) biodata, (b) comments about handouts or powerpoints that we upload, and (c) links to any other relevant sites. If we upload files, they will be in the form dignen.ppt, camerer.doc, etc. Judith Mader has agreed to edit our report on the session for Selections, and we may also each post our unedited reports here in the form selectionsmader.doc in case you're interested in seeing these. Happy reading!

Bob Dignen

BOB DIGNEN is a director of York Associates. He specialises in intercultural skills programmes and international team seminars which he delivers to clients in Germany, Switzerland, Iceland and Sweden. He is accredited to use The International Profiler (an intercultural profiling tool) and is also an advanced practitioner of TMP (Team Management Profile - an international team profiling tool). As an author, his titles include 50 Ways to improve your international presentation skills and 50 Ways to improve your intercultural skills published by Summertown. He is also co-author of Developing People Internationally, a multimedia international team training resource. Find out more at http://www.dialogin.com/

Rudi Camerer

Living in the US and Britain for several years taught me not only the language but also made me aware of the importance of cultural codes. Teaching English to adults back in Germany for me therefore implied combining language training and the topics of culture specific discourse.

I worked in adult education for more than twenty years, directing among other things Hamburg's Adult Education Institution (Volkshochschule) and the Weiterbildungs-Testsysteme GmbH, the head-office of TELC The European Language Certificates, which serves universities, language schools, administrative bodies and private companies on a Europe-wide scale. 

Together with German chambers of commerce we have developed a curriculum and test for INTERCULTURAL COMPENTENCE IN ENGLISH - ICE, on which my presentation is based. The ICE test will soon be in place on the website of the National Association of German Chambers of Commerce (DIHK). Find out more at www.elc-consult.com  

 

Judith Mader

I am from the North of England and spent much of my childhood in Asia.  I've been living in Germany for over 30 years and have taught English to adults and university students at several institutions. Some of my research has been into differences in discourse conventions and the use of English as an international language and as a lingua franca. I have been involved in teacher-training nationally and internationally and worked for many years as a test developer for Weiterbildungs-Testsysteme GmbH, the head office of TELC - The European Language Certificates. My present positon is Head of Languages at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.  I am also Senior Training and Assessment Consultant for elc-European Langauge Competence in Frankfurt. 

Julio Torres

I am a language lecturer and teacher trainer. I have taught Spanish and English as Foreign Language in Colombia and England at tertiary level in different universities and colleges for more than 15 years. Some of my research interests involve methodology, teacher training and, especially, intercultural communicative competence. At present, I am working as a Spanish Tutor at The Univesity of Birmingham  and as an ELT and Spanish lecturer at Warwickshire College. I have recently been awarded a Masters Degree in Research Methods by the Univesity of Warwick and the topic of my dissertation is Intercultural Competence and Teacher Cognition.

Peter Grundy

I've taught in schools in UK and Germany, in initial teacher training and in higher education in UK and Hong Kong. I'm now a retired person, although I still write and attend conferences. My interests are in ELT methodology and in pragmatics. I'm author of Doing Pragmatics Hodder, 3rd edn 2008. I was President of IATEFL 2003-5.

I'm using this space to add a few thoughts about my handout (you have to open the word file below), which may look complicated but isn't as difficult as it seems. One of the ideas is to show that the native English speaker uses Chinese / Japanese topic+comment discourse structure when she interacts with the two students - in a sense she 'speaks' Japanese. Only the Chinese speaker of English can understand both the native English speaker and the Japanese speaker of English with any great ease, and when she cannot, knows how to prompt for modified talk. So one question that arises is whether there's any point in trying to teach our learners to speak like native speakers when native speakers don't speak like natives in intercultural encounters. Another thing to notice is the amount of metapragatic and metasequential data - often realised as vocalizations like ah and oh and sometimes as zero-vocalizations too (i.e. pauses). These constrain or reduce the possible interpretations of what is said and thus make understanding simpler. Metapragmatic and metasequential marking seem to be crucial areas for learners and language users generally to develop and ones which they need to pay attention to when directed at them. (I gave talk on this topic when IATEFL last went to Brighton for the Conference.)

As a way into this handout, I suggest you first study the data in one of the small sections - the first one is fairly easy and clearly shows the native English speaker 'speaking' Chinese / Japanese and being understood to be doing this by her addressees. It's often said that English is being changed more today as a result of the way it's used by second language speakers than as a result of the way it's used by first language speakers - the native speaker is particularly interesting in the way she uses non-native (or perhaps lingua franca) English here. Next perhaps follow one of the speakers and look for consistent linguistic behaviour - for example the Japanese speaker of English has characteristic elaborative repairs which perhaps suggest a communication strategy, and the Chinese speaker of English is a great echo-er / commenter, etc.

A shorter extract from these data is discussed on pp241-3 of the third edition of Doing Pragmatics.

Thanks for reading this - and good luck with the handout. I'll be very interested to read any comments / thoughts you may have.

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