Intercultural Foreign Language Teaching And Learning In Higher Education Contexts

While research into intercultural teaching has grown exponentially during the past two decades, the research has primarily resorted to the use of quantitative data collection instruments and the interpretation of scores calculated through them. As such, studies in the field can seem somewhat decontextualized, ignoring in some cases setting-specific parameters. Therefore, further study is needed to bring together theory, research, and practice demonstrating how this teaching is reflected in research design and how it is undertaken in different settings. Intercultural Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Contexts is an essential reference source that provides a series of rich insights into the way intercultural education is practiced in numerous international contexts and showcases practical examples of teaching situations and classroom activities that demonstrate its impact within the classroom. Featuring research on topics such as higher education, multilingualism, and professionalism, this book is ideally designed for educators, researchers, administrators, professionals, academicians, and students seeking pedagogical guidance on intercultural teaching.

The chapters in this book all address the significance of the relationship between the aims and methods of language teaching and the contexts in which it takes place. Some consider the implications for the ways in which we research language teaching; others present the results of research and development work.

This book provides a contemporary and critical examination of the theoretical and pedagogical impact of Michael Byram’s pioneering work on intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship within the field of language education and beyond. The chapters address important theoretical and empirical work on the teaching, learning, and assessment of intercultural learning, and highlight how individual language educators and communities of practice enact intercultural learning in locally appropriate ways. The book offers comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible knowledge for researchers, teachers, teacher-trainers and students.

Despite widespread agreement about the need to develop interculturally competent graduates, there is a lack of agreement about how this goal may be achieved in practice. This is significant as universities around the world, particularly in English-speaking countries, have espoused an interculturally-aware vision for their future graduates and turned to language education, as an inherently intercultural activity, to expose students to a world which is linguistically and culturally different from their own. This book focuses on narrowing the gap between the often conflicting theoretical and practical imperatives faced by language teachers in an internationalised higher education context. It does so by providing comprehensive conceptual discussions of emerging critical intercultural language pedagogies as well as empirical accounts and case studies from the frontline.

This accessible book is written by teachers of modern languages and tackles the specifics of the discipline while situating it within the literature on teaching Modern Languages in Higher Education.

Over the last two decades drama pedagogy has helped to lay the foundations for a new teaching and learning culture, one that accentuates physicality and centres on performative experience. Signs of this ‘performative turn’ in education are especially strong in the field of foreign/second language teaching. This volume introduces scholars, language teachers, student teachers and drama practitioners to the concept of a performative foreign language didactics. Approaching the subject from a wide variety of contexts, the contributors explore the extent to which performative approaches, emphasising the role of the body as a learning medium, can achieve deep intercultural learning. Drama activities such as improvisation, hot seating and tableaux are shown to create rich opportunities for intercultural encounters that transport students beyond the parameters of conventional language, literature and culture education.

This volume gathers recent research findings in the field of foreign language (FL) teaching in Romanian higher education dwelling on both methodology and students’ learning outcomes. The book satisfies the need for an up-to-date overview of FL teaching in Romanian universities in the European context as well as from a global international perspective. This book confers visibility to Romanian foreign language scholars’ research and it opens new paths for debate and collaboration worldwide. The scholars included in this volume have extensive expertise in the field of foreign language teaching and research in higher education which is supported by their international recognition as specialists in their specific areas. The contributing authors approach their respective chapters relying on both qualitative and quantitative research. Their experience and conclusions will prove helpful for any foreign language professional working in tertiary education.

In this volume, academics involved in teaching second languages at university level describe how they have embraced the challenges involved in facilitating student learning. It sets out practical ideas which can be implemented in everyday contexts, while ensuring that pedagogical practice is underpinned by the relevant theoretical literature.

"This book takes cultural knowledge in language learning not only as a necessary aspect of communicative competence, but as an educational objective in its own right. If the aim of foreign language education is to foster cross-cultural awareness and self-realization, language pedagogy needs to come to grips with a range of fundamental issues: what do we mean by cultural context? Can discourse practices be taught like rules of grammar? What role does literature play in the development of second language literacy? How can learners acquire both an insider's and an outsider's understanding of the foreign culture as expressed through its language? By exploring these and other issues, the book can help language teachers reflect on their profession and place it within its larger societal and educational context. In turn, they can help learners become not only skilful users of the language, but also active architects of a new cross-cultural world order.".

Providing an overview of how online technology is being used for foreign language learning, this title assesses three different models of telecollaboration and covers theoretical approaches to online intercultural exchange as well as practical aspects.