Anthony J. Liddicoat & Angela Scarino. Research Centre ..... interaction (Crozet, 1996; Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001), pragmatic norms (Hudson,. Detmer, & Brown ...
In L. Sercu and A. Paran (2010) Testing the Untestable in Language and Education. (pp. 5273) Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
Eliciting the education
intercultural
in
foreign
language
Anthony J. Liddicoat & Angela Scarino Research Centre for Languages and Cultures Education University of South Australia Intercultural competence in the context of language education imposes a number of challenges for assessment. These challenges include the differing conceptualisations of the construct ‘intercultural competence’ and the resulting implications of this for teaching, learning and assessment; the fact that the different conceptualisations oriented as they are to different paradigms, variously omit either (1) an emphasis on language or (2) an emphasis on culture or (3) an emphasis on learning, when a conceptualisation requires the integration of all three of these; and the relationship between theoretical constructs and teacher constructs. These challenges are made more complex by how interrelationships between them are played out in practice in teaching, learning and assessment. Against this background, the question of how to elicit intercultural competence becomes central. This chapter will explore the consequences of these challenges for assessing intercultural competence by examining the practice of eliciting intercultural competence. It will describe case studies in eliciting the intercultural in a languages education context. It will report on a project conducted with five language teachers, who planned and taught a class with an intercultural focus, which was video recorded. Data was collected from their classes by video, interviews with the teachers and interviews with learners and learners’ responses to writing tasks. The chapter will argue that episodic approaches to assessment, which have been prevalent in current models of language assessment, are problematic and that interculturally oriented assessment requires multiple methods of elicitation that focus on ‘culture’ in language and the interrelationship between language and capture growth in understanding over time. In particular, eliciting intercultural competence requires methods that capture meta-awareness and learner reflection as well as focusing on aspects of performance.
Introduction Intercultural competence in the context of language education imposes a number of challenges for assessment. In part, the difficulty lies in the diverse understandings of the construct to be assessed, but even then eliciting the performances of intercuturality has proved to be problematic and assessment approaches may elicit only part of the overall construct, considering this to reflect the whole. Byram, Gribkova, and Starkey (2002) argue that while assessing facts or decontextualised knowledge is relatively straightforward, such assessments will not capture what it means to be intercultural, in that they cannot capture the embodied framing of beliefs, attitudes and values which distinguishes intercultural engagement from cultural knowledge (Liddicoat, 2002, 2005; Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino, & Kohler, 2003). The most elaborated model of intercultural competence and its assessment is the model of savoirs (savoir comprendre, savoir apprendre, savoir faire, savoir s’engager, savoir être) developed by Bryam and Zarate (Byram, 1997; Byram & Zarate, 1994) and its use as a basis for assessment as elaborated by Byram (1997) and extended by Sercu (2004). Sercu (2004: 76) proposes that the Byram model of savoirs be extended to include “a meta-cognitive dimension”, that is self-regulating mechanisms that enable learners to plan, monitor and
evaluate their own learning processes. In addition to the limitation noted by Sercu, the model of savoirs does not elaborate on the important ways in which language affects culture and culture affects language and how this is understood by the learner. Moreover this model does not clarify how savoirs (knowledge) are understood. This is important, for example, because savoir comprendre (knowing that) and savoir faire (knowing how) do not represent knowing as embodied and embodiment of knowledge is an important aspect for understanding the intercultural person as social actor rather than just social analyser. There are a number of fundamental difficulties involved in eliciting the intercultural of which the most obvious is defining the construct itself. While the term “intercultural” is widely used, definitions vary greatly and this means that ways of assessing vary widely and may have little consistency. One central problem is how the intercultural relates to language –many models of language teaching and learning separate the intercultural from the communicative and in so doing obscure or remove the fundamental relationship between the two. The difficulty with any modelling is that inevitably it involves some form of categorisation or breaking down into component parts. While this may be useful for understanding the extent of the phenomenon being assessed, the assessment itself needs to be holistic because componential approaches to the assessment of the intercultural inevitably miss the core construct, as the case studies investigated here will demonstrate.
Conceptualising assessment While this paper is centrally concerned with issues of eliciting, the practice of eliciting is one of a set of interrelate processes in an overall assessment cycle (Figure 1). Conceptualising
Eliciting
What to assess
How to elicit
The “ability” or “knowing” of interest
Tasks/ procedures that operationalise the construct
Judging
Validating
How to judge
How to justify
Criteria for judging performance, including 1. aspects of competence 2. performance analysis
Validation
Figure 1: The assessment cycle (Source: Scarino, 2006)
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The starting point for the assessment cycle is the conceptualisation of what will be assessed and for what purpose. This conceptualisation involves multiple assumptions, which may be more or less clearly articulated by the assessor, about the construct being assessed, and in education especially, about the nature of knowing and learning in relation to the construct. In any investigation of the assessment of the intercultural in languages education, it is the conceptualisation of the construct itself which will influence (and be influenced by) the process of elicitation. Jaeger (1999) argues that the problem with assessing the intercultural may lie more in problems of conceptualising what is being assessed that the assessment itself. The first issue therefore in dealing with eliciting the intercultural is to articulate what the intercultural itself is for the purposes of language education. The conceptualisation of the construct and the purpose of the assessment inform the process of eliciting. The elicitation itself will consist of tasks or procedures designed to make the construct visible in the performance of a learner. Choices made in the design of elicitation will determine how well the construct can be assessed and how much of the construct will be made visible. The task design is also informed by, and informs, the next element of the cycle, judgement. Judgment is based on the assessor’s construction or understanding of the criteria which make performance judgeable. The elicitation process must be designed reflect and capture the criteria on which judgment is to be made. Moreover, these criteria themselves will be informed by the overall conceptualisation of the purpose of assessment and the construct being assessed. Finally, the judgments made on the learner’s performance must be justified as accounts of the construct being assessed. This means that not only must performance be judged against criteria, but the inferred relationship drawn between performance and criterion must be defended and defensible. For the assessment process to be valid, inferences based on observations of performance must be shown to be adequate and appropriate given the empirical evidence of the learner’s performance and the theoretical perspectives brought to the assessment process (Messick, 1989). The conceptualisation of assessment as a cycle means that it is not a linear movement from conceptualisation to validation, but rather each process in the cycle informs, interrogates and modifies each other process, and all of which depend on the understanding of the construct.
Conceptualising the intercultural As argued above, eliciting any dimension of learning depends on the conceptualisation of the construct of interest and the intercultural itself is subject to varied conceptualisations (Crichton & Scarino, 2007; Liddicoat, 2004, 2006a). In this section, we outline our conceptualisation of the intercultural as a starting point for how we see this as being elicited and elicitable. The intercultural as it applies both generally and in language education specifically involves more than 3
knowledge, as a static construction of what is to be learnt. It involves process as a core concept. Firstly we believe that the intercultural is manifested as and through an ethical commitment to the acceptance and valuing of language and culture within and across languages and cultures. This ethical commitment involves reacting to encounters with diverse others in constructive ways. It is not a passive, observational approach to difference but rather and active ‘being in diversity’, in which diversity is not an external reality but rather communities in which one lives and acts. As a participant in diversity the ethical commitment of the intercultural individual includes accepting the responsibility to act interculturally, that is in a way that does justice to, is fair to and respectful of other participants in diversity. Within this overarching ethical position of the individual, the intercultural is developed through becoming aware of linguistic and cultural diversity and one’s own place within diversity. This awareness is the starting point for knowing the self and the other as linguistically and culturally situated individuals. The intercultural, therefore, involves an awareness of the interrelationship between language and culture in the communication and interpretation of meanings. Our understanding is always informed by the past and present of our particular language and culture, that is, we are at home in our own language and culture just as others are, and we are all therefore obliged to recognise the same in others. This means understanding the impact of such situatedness on communication and relationships. The relationship between meta-awareness and knowing is however not a unidirectional one in which awareness precedes knowledge, but a multidirectional one in which knowing contributes to expanded awareness and awareness contributes to expanded knowing. Through experiences of and engagement with languages and cultures, the intercultural learner develops an increasingly complex sense of self as a user of language and as a cultural being acting on and in the world. The intercultural in this sense involves not only awareness but also the ability to analyse, explain and elaborate this awareness; that is it involves a meta-level of awareness (or meta-awareness) which needs to be captured in the elicitation of the intercultural. For the intercultural language learner, the development of awareness and knowing of language and culture is achieved through the experience of another language and through this language another culture. It is through exposure to and engagement with culturally situated text – whether spoken or written, intrapersonal or interpersonal – that the learner comes to appreciate the manifestation of diversity through language as a communicative process. Interculturality is however not simply a manifestation of awareness and knowing, it also involves acting. Interculturality is a reflexive response to diversity which seeks to achieve interpersonal understanding across linguistic and cultural borders. The intercultural is manifested through language in use, through interpreting and expressing meaning across cultural boundaries in 4
dialogue with self and others, drawing on awareness and knowledge gained through previous experience, recognising the possibility of multiple interpretations of messages and the culturally embedded nature of meaning. This conceptualisation of the intercultural involves understanding the learner as both participant and analyser in interaction, that is as both learner and user of language and culture (Kern & Liddicoat, in press). The intercultural communicator does not simply communicate in contexts of diversity but also monitors, reflects on and interprets what is occurring in communication. While it is not true that the participant and analyser roles are always present to the same degree in any act of communication, however the capacity to draw on, combine and move between these interactional identities is a fundamental element of the intercultural. The intercultural individual engages in what Habermas (1983) terms communicative action – that is communication with the aim of developing mutual understanding – as a core enactment of his/her interculturality. Understanding emerges from interpersonal dialogue as well as from external observation of the other, and not from either independently. The interpersonal and interactional nature of the intercultural as it is conceived here requires that the language user is able to decentre form his/her own cultural and linguistic framework in order to see the world from alternative perspectives, or what (Byram et al., 2002) describe as the “ability to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. Such decentring is a capacity to understand multiple perspectives and a willingness to search for and accept multiple possible interpretations of the same message. As an interpersonal phenomenon, interculturality is predicated on the development of reciprocity in interaction, which recognises one’s own multiple roles and responsibilities and is sensitive to, and accommodating of, those of one’s interlocutors. This means that, for us, to be intercultural involves continuous intercultural learning through experience and critical reflection. There can be no final end point at which the individual achieves the intercultural state, but rather to be intercultural is by its very nature an unfinishable work in progress of action in response to new experiences and reflection on the action.
The construct of the intercultural and orientation to assessment The construct of the ‘intercultural’ can be understood in diverse ways, each with particular strengths and weaknesses. The particular conception held by teachers as teachers and as assessors is important because it is a conception that shapes the way in which they understand what is valuable in learning and how they understand what learners have learned. One way of understanding the construct of the ‘intercultural’ is as factual, objective knowledge which is removed from people as constructors and users of that knowledge. Within this conception, language use for intercultural communication is treated in a decontextualised way. The process of learning, is understood as a process of 5
acquisition of facts, abstracted and generalised – the ‘acquisition metaphor’, as described by Sfard (1998). The assessment orientation which is best aligned with this conception of the intercultural is the psychometric paradigm, (see Mabry, 1999 for a discussion of assessment paradigms) with its focus on standardised testing of content through objective procedures, and in which the basic approach to understanding learning is through comparison with either the performance of other learners (norm-referenced testing) or a predetermined standard or cut-score (criterion-referenced testing). Another way of understanding the ‘intercultural’ is as contextual and personalised knowledge, involving an ongoing, contextualised process of developing and elaborating personalised knowledge. An integral part of this understanding involves the examination of one’s own linguistic and cultural practices as a participant member of human society because these practices cannot be divorced from the contexts and processes of developing and using one’s own language(s) and culture(s) as an ongoing project. With regard to language use for intercultural communication, it is shaped by context in all its variability. The process of learning within this conception is understood as occurring through a process of participation to construct understanding in interaction with more knowledgeable others – the ‘participation metaphor’ as described by Sfard (1998). The assessment orientation which is best aligned with this conception of the ‘intercultural’ is contextual and personalised with a focus on assessing curriculum-related, authentic and learner-sensitive content through both objective and subjective, constructed-response procedures, which are evaluated subjectively and in which learning is understood as personally unique for each individual. Learners are assessed on the curriculum which they actually experience and which is personally meaningful to them, rather than on standardised content; it is performed in ways that allow for the best opportunity for learners to show what they know. Within this assessment paradigm, understood as ‘alternative’ assessment, personal or self-evaluation is critical because of the importance, ultimately, of self-knowledge as the basis for all understanding. Within these two broard orientations to assessing the intercultural various methods have been used to operationalise the diverse understandings of the construct. One approach to assessing interculturality is through the assessment of intercultural communicative behaviours. In this way, intercultural competence is treated as if it were a separable language skill, analogous to the conventional macro-skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing (Damen, 1987). The tasks used are forms of enactment tasks (Sercu, 2004) in which a learner is asked perform the role of a communicator in an intercultural situation. Common formats include role-plays and simulations, which are used to test norms of interaction (Crozet, 1996; Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001), pragmatic norms (Hudson, Detmer, & Brown, 1992; Kasper & Dahl, 1991), and some linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena (Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001); cross-cultural mediation 6
tasks (Kordes, 1991; Meyer, 1991); and discourse completion tasks, which assess control of pragmatic norms and the accuracy of learners’ understanding of native speakers’ language use and the accuracy of their pragmatic choices (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). These enactment tasks elicit performance in an intercultural situation, but it is often difficult to judge on the basis of such tasks whether or not this performance is in fact intercultural. Conformity to a set of cultural norms of another group shows very little about the knowledge and dispositions i.e. the interpretive resources that the learner brings to the task and which contribute to the performance and the developing meta-awareness of performance. In fact, in assessment contexts in which conformity is rated highly, such conformity may be based on little other than achieving completion of the task. In order to become intercultural, such tasks need to add to the elicited performance a process of reflection. The intercultural in communication is not a simple equation of performance with intercultural competence, but rather a reflective recognition of what is at play in a particular instance of communication. The surface manifestation of language use is not the only crucial dimension but rather it is the construction of the learners as learner which looks different in that the assessment is made of a developing critical awareness which the learner brings to interaction as a language user. The elicited behaviour is then not only the target language behaviour per se, but rather it includes an indication of the language user’s critical awareness as participant and analyser of communication, with the potential to learn from and adjust to the intercultural realities which exist in communication. In some approaches to assessing intercultural competence (Crozet, 1996), the role-play itself is not the core element of the assessment task for it is not the role play itself which elicits the intercultural, but rather the subsequent task of reflection upon the role-play, and the confrontation of the communicative norms of two cultures which this entails. The role-play is an instance of language in use, which becomes the basis for exploration of affective and attitudinal responses and similarities and differences between cultural expectations. This reflective dimension is, however, neither solely or necessarily, reflection on self as communicator, as in this case. It encompasses issues of the participants perspective’s on the interaction seeing the event from one’s own perspective, from the others perspective and also from potential hybrid perspectives resulting from multilayered cultural contexts. It also applies to understanding how culture, language, affect, attitudes, understandings, etc. influence interaction and the communication of meaning both as a process and as an outcome of communication and one’s own role in these. A second tradition in assessing the intercultural is the elicitation of the learners’ intercultural dispositions or understandings. Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein, & Colby (1999) examine three different types of such models as potential 7
approaches for the assessment of intercultural skills: 1. attitudinal tests; 2. culture assimilator tests; and 3. cultural awareness tests. Attitudinal tests are designed to elicit people’s reactions to a cultural group. One form of these tests includes questions about the respondents’ acceptance of people from a particular group in a particular situation (for example, employment, social interaction, marriage) rated on a seven-point scale from acceptance to rejection (e.g. Cadd, 1994). An alternative approach is to use a semantic differential scale demonstrating attitudes in which respondents locate people from a cultural group on a continuum between positive and negative traits (good-bad, honest-dishonest, friendly-unfriendly, etc.). A third variant asks respondents to agree or disagree with statements made about the target cultural group, for example, ‘the French are arrogant’. (Seelye, 1994). These models are a problem for assessing intercultural understanding because they rely on simple binary oppositions, which run the risk of establishing stereotypical patterns of thought about the target culture. More importantly for assessing language learning, they fail to engage with cultural variability, complexity, cultural knowledge, or communicative and linguistic abilities, and as such are poor indicators of the ability to use a language in an intercultural context. Culture assimilator tests (e.g Brislin, Cushner, Cherrie, & Yong, 1986) differ from attitudinal tests because they include in the eliciting contextual information in the form of short episodes of intercultural interaction or critical incidents of communication to which the respondent reacts. Each episode is followed by statements which respondents select as the best explanation of the episode they have just been presented or may be the trigger for learners to write an explanation for the episode, rather than simply choosing from a range of options. Such tests elicit the respondents’ knowledge of cultural conventions, and their ability to interpret a situation from a different cultural perspective. However, they do not examine the productive use of this knowledge in communication, nor their ability to modify their own patterns of cultural behaviour in order to achieve communicative goals. Cultural awareness tests seek to elicit cultural knowledge as it is manifested in communicative tasks. What differs in these tests is the types of cultural knowledge being assessed. These can range from observation of controlled instances of specific cultural items (Baugh, 1994) to demonstrations of intangible learning such as empathy, and understanding of cultural relativity (Byram & Morgan, 1994). Cultural awareness tests cover a range of different approaches to questions of language and culture, moving from tests of integrated language and cultural knowledge to displays of meta-level cultural awareness, often with minimal connection to language. These approaches to eliciting the intercultural recognise the dimension of the intercultural which is related to values, values clarification, understanding different positions, etc. They therefore address what is missing in many of the communicatively focused tasks in that they seek to understand the dispositions 8
the learner brings to constructing the intercultural. For languages education, however, the problem with such tests is that what they elicit is decontextualised and generalised dispositions which are little connected with action or with the language being learnt as an element of the intercultural experience and developing repertoire of the learner. Moreover, what is elicited tends not to have a developmental perspective in that learners either possess or do not possess the attitudes, values or knowledges being elicited. Once these have been demonstrated it can be difficult to see what educative progression there can be in such assessment. The key idea here is not that the important educational outcome of intercultural learning is not the clarification of one’s own values, but also a process of understanding and negotiating values in interpersonal contexts across cultures. The dispositions of the interculturally aware individual are not intercultural simply because they have been clarified and understood, but rather because they are seen as a relative positioning among a field of possible values with which the individual needs to engage. It is through communication that people understand the values of others and their own values and begin to respect and understand why certain people hold certain opinions (Habermas, 1983). Rather than eliciting values, assessemnt needs to elicit the ability to gain feedback on one’s own initial positioning from others, and being able to respond to this feedback and to the initial positioning in such as way as to show the ability to reflect on one’s own values and those of others from multiple perspectives. This approach to the intercultural as ethical reflects approaches in wider values education: Acquiring skills to reflect on values is necessary for keeping a critical distance with regard to values, observing different perspectives, and making judgements on one’s own behaviour and others’ behaviour (Veugelers & Vedder, 2003) In languages education, reflection on dispositions and understandings needs to be located within the context of the learners’ linguistic and cultural repertoire that includes their own language and the additional one being studied. The clarification of values and understanding does not come from a general exposure to another language and culture, but to targeted reflection on language(s) and culture(s) as they emerge from meaningful communication. For example, Liddicoat (2006b), in discussing Australian learners’ understandings of the interpersonal as represented through the French pronouns tu and vous over time, used a series of instances of language use which depicted an increasingly nuanced use of these pronouns in communication as a way of both promoting and eliciting an intercultural response to this element of French. This study showed that learners construct representations of greater complexity about the nature of the interpersonal relationship as they reflect on instances of authentic language use. In some cases, learners began their acquisition of French with a 9
view of the tu/vous distinction as anomalous or problematic as constructions of interpersonal relationships, but increasingly came to see their own construction of the interpersonal as a cultural phenomenon. This enabled them to see the cultural contractedness of the interpersonal in French as having value and an internal logic, even though it is different from their own construction.
Eliciting the intercultural In line with Sfard’s (1998) notion of holding both the acquisition and participation metaphors in play, with regard to different understandings of the intercultural, it is necessary to assess not only subject matter knowledge but also learners’ personal engagement with that knowledge. What becomes of interest, then, is learners’ ability to negotiate language use as participants within diverse contexts (participation metaphor). This process cannot be managed successfully without learners knowing what is the same and different in different languages and cultures (acquisition metaphor). Elicitation, then, involves not just seeking to draw out learners’ understanding of intercultural experiences as observers of others’ participation in interaction, but most importantly, drawing out learners’ understandings of themselves as participants in learning and using language(s) in the context of culture(s), that is, in learning and using languages as actual intercultural experiences. Learners embody their own particular linguistic, social, cultural and learning history that informs the way they interpret the world. Elicitation of learners’ intercultural capability entails seeking to tap into learners’ personal frameworks of interpretive resources, encouraging them to explore their own understandings of the way they interpret the world through language and culture and how that, in turn, influences how they understand others. It entails assessing learners’ language use in the target language as well as their own understanding of what’s at stake in communicating interculturally, that is, how what they say is received by others and how this influences the way others see them, and that this is always variable. For example, in the learners’ use of particular forms of greeting, it is not only recognising and knowing the different forms and their use in so-called ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ contexts, but knowing how to decide and how their decision is likely to influence other participants in the interaction. Thus in assessing the intercultural in languages learning and using, what is to be elicited is learners’ capacity to integrate, within interaction an understanding of themselves as culturally and linguistically situated and to consider the impact of their situatedness and that of others on their interaction with others. Learners therefore need to perform their language learning and use in culturally appropriate ways, take account of how fellow participants respond (what others ‘make of me’ in interaction and conversely) and reflect upon how participants understand each other on the basis of the language used, in diverse interactions, in diverse contexts. In this way, they are invited to use language appropriately in
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relation to their understanding of the cultural/intercultural context, which in turn adds the potential for engaging with variability. A central dimension of the elicitation of learners’ performance is how teachers position learners as performers in interaction and the nature and range of opportunities they are given to perform and further develop their understanding in an ongoing way. Each new opportunity and experience of interaction depends on learners’ prior conceptions and expectations in relation to their own and the additional language and culture. These experiences are cumulative, each one adding to the learners’ repertoire of participation. It is for this reason that elicitation cannot be only episodic but rather needs to be ongoing, tapping into the ever-developing diversity of scope and complexity of intercultural understanding. In both single episodes and cumulatively, intercultural communication involves understanding how to engage with the variable context of communication to interpret and construct meaning, in interaction with others across diverse cultures. From an assessment perspective it is important to elicit communicative performance and it is equally important to elicit how learners understand the distinctive social and cultural context of that communicative performance, that is, eliciting how they explain the intercultural to themselves. It is not possible to evidence the intercultural without an explanatory/elaborating dimension. This is because an instance of language use for intercultural communication does not reveal learners’ capacity to draw connections between the decisions they make in using language to make meaning and the social and cultural context of use. Thus, in eliciting linguistically and culturally appropriate language use, in order to specifically elicit intercultural understanding, it is necessary to elicit learners’ interpretation and developing meta-awareness of the social and cultural context.
Case studies in eliciting the intercultural in language teaching and learning Case Study 1: Eliciting intercultural awareness1 The case study established to explore the process of eliciting the ‘intercultural’ in language teaching and learning, involved five experienced teachers (two teachers of French, two of Indonesian and one of German) and a small group of their Year 10 learners2 The focus was specifically on aspects of meta-awareness of language, culture as a central dimension of evidencing the intercultural and the role of learners as analysers, rather than eliciting this awareness in the context of intercultural interaction – that is the role of learners as language users. Two inter-related elicitation devices were developed. The first focused on the teacher and involved the video-recording of a teaching sequence where the ‘intercultural’ as understood by the teacher was considered to be a focus and where assessment took place informally through classroom
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interaction. Three weeks after the initial video-recording, each teacher participated in an in-depth retrospective discussion and interview which was audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed. Each teacher was asked to select episodes to discuss with the researchers, and, after focussing on these episodes, the discussion extended to general exchange about the ways teachers mediate intercultural language learning in classroom interaction. The second device focussed on the learners and was developed collaboratively by a member of the research team and each of the teachers. The whole class of learners was asked to participate in a writing task which involved (1) responding to questions based on a text in the target language and (2) a short composition in English. The writing task was followed by a learner interview with a group of five learners from each class, selected on the basis of their responses to the first task. The interviews were conducted by the researchers, they invited learners to reflect upon and discuss their responses to the writing tasks. Both sets of devices were designed to elicit teachers’ and learners’ understanding of the ‘intercultural’ in language teaching and learning. The multiple sources of data were analysed thematically with a view to documenting learner and teacher conceptions of the ‘intercultural’ (i.e. the construct) and to examining procedures for eliciting intercultural language learning.
Teachers’ constructions of the intercultural To understand the ways in which each teacher constructed the notion of the intercultural as a prelude to understanding how they elicited the construct, each teacher was asked to respond to the following three questions: o What were you trying to do in this particular lesson with respect to the integration of language and culture? o What did you want your learners to learn from this lesson? o How does it relate to the rest of your program? The general nature of the questions represents a deliberate attempt to allow scope for teachers to elaborate. The first question was designed to elicit teachers’ understanding of the integration of language and culture, understood by the researchers as a way of articulating the intercultural. The second question was intended to elicit the goals/purposes for learning and using an additional language and the third question was intended to elicit the ongoing nature of developing intercultural understanding through the learning program. Follow up questions included questions about the teachers’ own values and beliefs, conceptions of language, culture and intercultural learning, the personal education of young people, and ethics in interaction. In general, although all the teachers in the case study explored cultural themes in their teaching and learning programs, these were not always 12
connected deliberately to linguistic and cultural concepts related to the intercultural, nor were these specific connections to the lives of learners themselves thereby allowing for a personal connection, and finally they were not elaborated continuously over time. The teachers were aware of the lack of connection or integration and related this to issues of time and their choices about what is central to language and culture-teaching. Some expressed the view that they see themselves as teachers of language and not teachers of history, geography, science and so on, a comment that reflects their conception of teaching the relationship between language and culture and the relationship between language, content and meta-awareness. They all perceived it as useful to see several layers of meaning in teaching languages, going from surface to deeper treatment of language and culture in communication, that is, developing meta-awareness, but found it difficult to connect this conceptually with learners’ personal experiences and lives and concepts from other areas of the curriculum. Additional themes that emerged from the analysis of the transcripts include the implicit versus explicit integration of language and culture learning; the perception that ‘culture’ contributes substance to language learning but also takes away the focus from language; and, the treatment of intercultural understanding as an input rather than as integral to interaction and intercultural learning. Finally this case study highl;ights the importance of eliciting the teachers’ conceptions as it is these which influence how they construct and mediate students’ leanirng and performance of the intercultural In eliciting teacher conceptions, there is always and inevitably the effect of the presence of the video-recorder and the interviewer because performance is necessarily a social, cultural and interactive accomplishment. Recognising that no elicitation procedure can ever be neutral, the nature of the elicitation questions themselves in this context is also influential.
Learners’ responses Learners undertook two pieces of writing, one related to the latest theme and texts they had explored in the languages classroom and another which was more general. In the Indonesian class, for example, learners had explored the theme: Indonesian food and cooking in French the language or rap music and in German the theme of fairytales. The learners were asked to address explicit questions relating to this topic. For example, for Indonesian these questions were: Part A:
‘Indonesia has a wider variety of food venues with more attractive food available to them than Australian young people’. In at least one paragraph, state whether or not you agree with this statement and give your reasons why.
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Part B:
List 3 words in Indonesian that relate to food/cooking. Explain what each word means. Describe how Indonesians use these words. Why are they important words in Indonesian culture? Think about everything that you know about Indonesian food and culture. What has interested you most about it? Describe what interests you about it. What has learning about Indonesian food and culture made you think about in your own way of life in Australia?
These questions, although framed entirely in English for the purposes of both elicitation and response were intended to elicit learners’ overall “takehome” understandings of their exploration of the theme. In part B, there was a focus on particular words in Indonesian. The intention here was both to elicit specific understanding of word-concepts and to include the deliberate elicitation of aspects of the target language. Information was elicited about the way in which words are used in the target language and culture and why the wordconcept is important, but learners were not asked to use them actively themselves in interaction to communicate meaning. The final question invited a connection with learners’ way of life in Australia. The focus in this set of questions was on eliciting knowledge derived from engagement in a thematic learning sequence; as devices for elicitation of learning, they invite learners on this occasion to demonstrate understanding from the perspective of analysers of language, culture and interculturality rather than as participants. The focus was on aspects of meta-awareness and overall reflection, the questions used for French and Indonesian were: For French:
Imagine that last year you stayed with a French family. This year your host brother/sister is coming to stay with you. You really want him/her to feel welcome and comfortable in Australia. In order to do this, you will need to explain to your family and friends some of the things that are important for your French friend. Make a list of things your parents/family will need to know. Make a list of things that your friends will need to know. What things about your daily life might you need to explain to your exchange brother/sister? How will you explain to your family the way that the French language says a lot about French culture? Give some examples.
For Indonesian: Imagine this is your final year of studying Indonesian. Your class has decided to make a collection of impressions of Indonesia for a class album. You have been asked to write a
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summary describing your impressions of Indonesian culture: what is it, what makes it the same or different from your culture, why do you think it is the way it is? Include examples of Indonesian language and culture, your opinions and comparisons to justify or explain your points. Again, these tasks were intended to elicit generalised understandings of language and culture, positioning learners in the role of analysers of language and culture, rather than as participant users of language in interaction. Both tasks deliberately required of learners that they de-centre from their primary linguistic and cultural context to consider the context of users of the target language. Depending on the purpose of assessment, this style of questioning can be seen as contributory, at least to some extent to understanding learners’ understanding or meta-awareness of language and culture. The purpose here is ‘knowing that and why’ rather than eliciting socio-culturally appropriate target language use on the part of learners in intercultural interactions. In the learner interviews, groups of five learners were asked about their responses to the writing tasks through two key questions:
What was your initial reaction to the task? Is it similar to/different from others you usually do?
What kinds of opportunities do you have in your course to learn about culture?
In addition, learners were asked to elaborate on some of the generalisations that emerged from their writing in relation to four broad areas: people, place/society, language, comparisons. For example some of the questions for French included: People:
‘They are expressive people’. ‘They are confident people’. What gives you this impression? Is it the case for all?
Place/society: ‘Fashions in France are important to know about – so as not to judge by Australian standards’. What does that mean? Language: ‘The language illustrates a ‘laissez faire’ approach to life’. What do you mean by this? Comparison: ‘French is more specific than English’. What do you mean? What does this say about Australian culture? As with the teachers, eliciting learner conceptions is shaped by the presence of the interviewer and by the nature of the elicitation procedures or devices used. This shaping process needs to be taken into account when making inferences from learners’ responses.
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Learner’s responses indicated that they were not used to the style of questioning used here for elicitation. While they were asked to respond in English rather than the target language, thereby being positioned as analysers rather than users of the target language and culture, their responses revealed valuable evidence to the teachers (and to themselves) as well as the researchers, about the way learners are constructing language and culture, their metaawareness, their conceptions and misconceptions, and most importantly, the cumulative picture they are developing of their own and other languages and cultures and of interculturality. For the teacher, the learners’ responses also reflect back on their teaching and the messages that their learners form and take away from the process. What was elicited in this case study was not learners’ capability to negotiate their use of the target language in interaction across diverse cultural contexts, that is, intercultural communicative interaction, but rather, the sense the learners were making and the development of their self-awareness of their own and the target culture(s). Learners can only participate in intercultural interaction if they have a sense of the cultural context, particularly, what is the same and different from their own. Beyond language use, eliciting the intercultural requires eliciting learners’ interpretations of the cultural context and what is going on in interaction, all of which are part of their developing meta-awareness not only of the role of language and culture in interaction but also the nature of intercultural interaction itself. This is an integral part of communication in general. As such, for learners the processes of analysis, explanation, and elaboration of their meta-awareness are integral to evidencing the intercultural. The case study focused specifically on the analysis dimension of the role and interrelationship of language and culture in communication, separately from the process of intercultural interaction. It would be both feasible and desirable to integrate both aspects in a single elicitation procedure, but the decision about the focus of elicitation depends on the teachers’/assessors’ purposes, which at any particular moment may or may not be integrative. Case Study 2: Eliciting intercultural behaviours The case study for eliciting intercultural behaviours was conducted with 10 second year university level French learners in the ab initio stream, studying in Australia.3 These learners had completed one year of study of French, beginning at tertiary level. The learners participated in role play tasks based around the question “T’as passé un bon weekend?” both prior to instruction and immediately after instruction focusing on cultural differences in the values associated with this question in French and Australian English and the resulting interactional differences in ways conversations were constructed in response to the question.
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In cross-cultural studies of interaction (Béal, 1992), the key differences found for this question were that in Australia, the question has the function of an access ritual at the beginning of the working week while in France, it is a nonritual information seeking question. In Australian interactions, the question is used frequently with a large range of interlocutors and the exchange is typically reciprocated while in French interactions the question is asked less frequently and only among friends and is less likely to be reciprocated as the asking is motivated by a desire to know about a particular experience. The interaction result of these different evaluations is that Australian interactions tend to involve short generalised, formulaic answers and the conversation usually moves to other topics or to closing quickly. In many interactions individuals are referred to by their affiliation to the speaker (my partner, my sister, etc.) rather than by name. The interactions usually involve minimal feedback from the listener, as the social role involved is expressed through reciprocity rather than involvement in the topic. In French interactions the question leads directly to talk on the topic, which is specific and detailed and involves the expression of opinions and feelings about the events which transpire. Interactions tend to be lively, with a great emphasis placed on using the answer to the question as an opportunity to interest and entertain one’s interlocutor. Moreover, the interlocutor is treated as knowing family relationships and friends, who are discussed by name rather than affiliation. French interactions are characterised by high levels of involvement from the listener, with frequent feedback being given, repetition of elements of talk and frequent overlap, especially in the form of collaborative completions, to show engagement. The situation is therefore contextually and interactionally different between the two cultures, and as Béal (1992) demonstrates, the interaction differences frequently generate negative impressions across these cultural groups.
Feature Content
Form
Dyads A B C D E S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 S10 leads to talk on topic detail opinions/ feelings lively knowing feedback repetition overlap ? = feature present = feature absent ? = ambiguous result
Table 1: Features of performance in role plays without instruction (Source: Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001)
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Prior to receiving instruction, Australia learners demonstrated a strong adherence to Australian interactional expectations in constructing talk about the topic (see Table 1), with almost no dyads producing any of the salient features of interaction. What this task elicited, in terms of intercultural behaviours, was a lack of awareness or a lack of use of French culturally based interactional norms. Following interculturally focused instruction which involved raising awareness of the interactional and conceptual difference relating to questions about the weekend, and opportunities to experiment with new norms and interactional expectations, the learners’ behaviours differed significantly (See Table 2). In this case, the task elicited an ability to reproduce the interactional expectations of another culture, although different dyads performed differently on this task. A Feature Content
Form
leads to talk on topic detail opinions/ feelings lively knowing feedback repetition overlap = feature present
B
S1 S2 S3 S4 ? ? = feature absent
Dyads C D E S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 S10 ? ? ? ? ? ? = ambiguous result
Table 2: Features of performance in post-instruction role plays As was the case with case study 1, case study 2 is again only a partial eliciting of the intercultural. This study, like many studies of learners’ production in interlanguage pragmatics elicited culturally more appropriate interaction as the result of interculturally focussed language learning. It did not, however, gauge what motivated the use of the practices.4 In fact, in a language learning context, it is probable that the interactional patterns were motivated by a desire to perform in an appropriate way in a language learning task rather than from purely intercultural motivations. In fact, what happens in such tasks is that the interaction is not really considered as being intercultural, except at a very superficial level – that of the behaviours of people from one culture in response to learning about the behaviours in another. In such studies, the non-native speaker is in fact being measured against native speakers’ culturally embedded interactional norms, with the level of accuracy in using these norms being the criterion for judging the performance.5 Intercultural communication is not identical with an assimilation or approximation to others’ norms, rather it is a principled engagement with diverse assumptions, expectations and understandings. For this reason, it is possible that authentically intercultural
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behaviour may be less native-speaker-like, with individuals negotiating their own identities between cultures and manifesting these by selecting elements from their whole linguistic and cultural repertoire (Kramsch, 1999; Liddicoat, 2002). Interculturality is not simply a question of adopting or adapting native speakers’ ways of interacting, it is rather a negotiated understanding of the meaning that are constructed in the multilayered interplay of languages and cultures in interaction.
Discussion: Eliciting and assessing the intercultural While the case studies described above focused only on eliciting aspects of language and cultural awareness as the basis for the analysis dimension of intercultural understanding, the elicitation of the intercultural entails a fuller set of features. Some of these include:
that the elicitation procedure or task involve interaction in the target language with other users of that language which requires that learners de-centre from their own language and culture; that it involves eliciting learners’ meta-awareness of the languageculture nexus in such interactions and that for the purposes of assessment learners be able to analyse, explain and elaborate this awareness; that within the elicitation procedure the learner be positioned as both participant and analyser in interaction, though in any individual elicitation task one or the other role may be foregrounded, depending on purpose; that the procedures elicit learners’ understanding of different perspectives in the interaction, as an ethical concern; that a combination of a range of elicitation procedures be used to capture (1) the diverse and multi-dimensional nature of intercultural interaction and related meta-awareness, and (2) the recognition of the need to manage the variability of context, given that each episode of intercultural interaction presents a new set of contextual considerations to be negotiated in communication that elicitation procedures be considered within a long-term perspective that allows development and progress to be taken into account, for example, through the use of portfolios that the elicitation procedures include self-assessment that recognise learning as a personal process and a personally unique accomplishment.
Fundamentally, the elicitation procedures are no more than a device, an artefact for capturing learners’ ever developing interpretive framework that is brought to bear in participating in and reflecting on their own role in intercultural interaction, simultaneously as an interactant a performer and an 19
analyser. This poses challenges in that the procedure can only be a proxy for eliciting the knowledge and understanding of interest, a complex construct that is understood in diverse ways. To capture the complexity elicitation must include opportunities for learners to interact interculturally and to analyse, appraise, reconsider and learn from the interaction in an ongoing way, as is characteristic of human communication in general and in a more intense way in communication across diverse cultures. Further challenges emerge in seeking to identify and judge the evidence of the development of this dynamic understanding and warranting the inferences made about learners’ developing understanding (see Figure 1). It is not likely that any single task, whether as acts of communicating or as the articulation of dispositions and insights, will in itself fully elicit the intercultural as understood an experienced by any one learner. Assessment of the intercultural, at least in languages education, needs to be based on demonstrations of both intercultural communication and the insights and dispositions towards diversity, with an orientation to assessing the individual’s learning over time. Such an approach to assessment cannot be captured in a single episode, which cannot capture either the longitudinal nature of learning nor the dynamic and multilayered nature of the intercultural (Liddicoat, 2002). What is needed is a combination of communicative and reflective tasks in the form of a portfolio collected over time. The notion of a portfolio of tasks for assessing intercultural competence is not new, but the ways in which portfolios are understood in language assessment varies greatly. At it simplest and weakest formulation a portfolio is no more than a collection of individual episodes, which may or may not have internal coherence and connectivity. While such a portfolio provides multiple exemplars of various aspects of the intercultural, it presents only a weak eliciting of the developmental nature of the intercultural, whether from the perspective of the learner or that of the assessor: the portfolio represents a collection of episodes – each of these is a means of eliciting but the portfolio itself does not elicit; it evidences. A stronger version of the portfolio would add to the collection of tasks commentaries on the tasks themselves in which the learner engaged with the task as an instance of intercultural experience. While such an approach captures a stronger perspective on the learners’ own understandings of the learning experience, it is still weak from a developmental perspective. What is needed still is a set of procedures, designed or selected to capture diverse instantiations of the intercultural over time so that these are less restricted to particular (partial) constructions of the intercultural. Portfolios can be further strengthened as a resource for eliciting the intercultural by including the learners’ reflections on the process of learning to be intercultural itself. Such a reflection is an on-going self-evaluation of individuals’ perceptions of their own progress towards an intercultural stance through the process of language learning. This is more than a language 20
biography; it is a guided reflection on the specific learnings which have emerged over a course of study. The aim of the reflection is to encourage the development of insight into oneself as an intercultural actor. Ideally, this should be accompanied by a culminating commentary in which the individual learner reflects on his/her own journey towards interculturality as an on-going, and unfinished project. Such portfolios, we argue, allow longer term development to emerge as the key focus of assessment and this development is where the intercultural can be seen and judged. No experience, communicative engagement or reflection on culture or on learning is itself “interculturality”. Each episode is no more than that, and interculturality, as we have described it is not an episodic phenomenon. The portfolio has to be designed around tasks which involve features such as those discussed above in order for the portfolio to present the most complete and most coherent account of learners as intercultural beings.
Conclusion The practice of eliciting the intercultural requires and forces a clear conception of the construct being assessed because the intercultural is pervasive. The key dimension for assessment is that eliciting the intercultural involves both communicative performance and meta-awareness and these are very difficult to capture through any particular task. While the complex nature of the intercultural can be elicited through a range of tasks, it is important that the range of tasks does in fact elicit the fullest possible construction of the intercultural. The effectiveness of any assessment approach will ultimately be based on the conceptualisation of the construct – a conceptualisation which needs to be clearly articulated by assessors for themselves and clearly integrated into an overall assessment approach. This conceptualisation shapes not only the elicitation of the intercultural, which is the focus of this paper, but also the judgment made about what is elicited and its validation.
Notes 1. 2.
3. 4. 5.
We wish to thank Leo Papademetre and Michelle Kohler for their collaboration on Case Study 1. Year 10 in Australian education marks the end of the junior secondary and the beginning of the senior secondary cycle of schooling. Learners are approximately 15 years of age and, in the main, will have been learning the target language for 3 years. A fuller discussion of the study can be found in Liddicoat and Crozet (2001). The study did, however, elicit from learners their affective reactions to using these practices. In Liddicoat and Crozet’s (2001) study, however, it was the presence of particular features which was observed, not the accuracy with which they 21
were reproduced, allowing individual’s to mediate their behaviour between different cultural expectations and assumptions
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