Intercultural Competence

Using travel literature to extend intercultural competence, Geoff Hall, 10.25-10.55, Sunday 17th April

He defined intercultural competence as not only objective knowledge about knowledge, awareness and understanding similarities and differences between different cultures, but also understanding of the stereotypes and their reasons.

He began his talk by raising the question of how teachers could challenge stereotypes and images that mass media imposed on us.

He stated that one idea was to give lectures about intercultural competence. Also, he gave a very creative class tip for teachers: Doing discourse analysis of the texts with the students and re-writing them!

Teachers can bring different genres of texts on the same topic to the classrooms from different perspectives and analyse these texts in terms of vocabulary, grammar, pictures and other textual features. I'm sure that it will spark a good class discussion. Then, students can be asked to re-write the text with their own impressions.

I have never thought the discourse analysis as a learning tool so far, but this session has inspired me to use the discourse analysis not just as research methodology, but as a learning tool, too.