Michael Byram is a linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Durham, as well as special advisor to the Council of Europe ‘Modern Languages Project’. He has published many articles and books on the theme of intercultural communicative competence, often in collaboration with other authors. They are mostly published by Multilingual Matters www.multilingualmatters.com.

In the following interview he talks to Ewa Bandura, a teacher trainer from Nauczycielskie Kolegium Języków Obcych (Foreign Language Teacher Training College), Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków.

 

Has the concept of Intercultural Competence (IC) changed since it was first used in the context of FLT? How can IC be defined today?

 

In fact the phrase IC had been used elsewhere, or earlier, than I ever used that phrase and I suppose what we did was try to use it as a label for a certain more systematic definition. If I think of the first paper we (i.e. Geneviève Zarate and I) wrote then, the definition had changed quite considerably when I wrote my book Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. I deliberately wrote somewhere in the book that this is my work and not Geneviève Zarate’s. I did not want her to be responsible for it. The basic change is to introduce the idea of savoir s’engager, the idea of political education, as part of what ought to happen in intercultural language teaching in compulsory education.

 

How can IC be defined today? IC is the ability to see yourself as others see you, to respond to them in the light of that, and to interact with them in the light of that. See yourself as others see you. And if all the people in an interaction do that, then we are going to have a more political exchange. ‘See yourself as others see you’ is not my phrase, but it is a good phrase.

 

What do you see as the main difficulties or challenges in teaching and assessing IC?

 

Well, teaching is not problematic, assessment is very problematic. Teaching is a question of using your imagination, a question of changing your views from seeing cultural teaching as being a transmission of knowledge or transmission of information, to seeing it as developing a competence, and that’s not difficult. It needs as much variety and imagination as possible, but it is not difficult. What’s difficult is assessment, and it’s difficult both in the moral sense as well as in the practical sense. And although I have written about assessment for the reasons that we all know, i.e. that what isn’t tested isn’t taught, nonetheless there are problematic aspects of assessment and we can’t be sure what the answers are. Particularly about attitude. Assessing skills is OK, assessing knowledge is OK, assessing the ability to evaluate is OK, but not assessing values or attitudes. That’s where there are problems of a moral nature, as well as a technical nature.

 

As the recent research in seven countries shows teachers of foreign languages declare their willingness to develop their students’ IC. However, in their actual teaching practice they still introduce the cultural component by imparting to their students facts and opinions on a given foreign culture, rather than developing their awareness and skills. Why? How can this be changed?

 

Why? Because they haven’t been trained to do anything else, and when you are not trained to do something you tend to teach the way you were taught. So the teachers do what they remember was done to them. And how can it be changed? Well, through teacher training. There is also an increasing quantity of material and ideas, and good textbooks and good books for teachers about teaching, which can be used. They did not exist ten years ago.

 

What is more important then, teaching materials or teacher training?

 

In fact if you are a teacher trainer, like all teachers, you haven’t the time you would like to have. So having materials that you can show and demonstrate and get [college] students to, first of all, imitate and then develop, is important. I mean the work that has been done by the British Council in Bulgaria [Branching out: a Cultural Studies Syllabus], or in Poland [British Studies Materials for Polish Teachers of English]. The trouble is those materials can only be exemplars. They can’t be applied because you have to change them, and teachers need to be trained and helped to see the potential in such materials for their own situations.

 

Should the teacher have IC or any other competences or qualities in order to be able to teach IC?

 

Yes, you have got to have IC, of some kind. I mean there is no such thing as a perfectly interculturally competent person. We are all developing all the time and I suppose that’s a difference between an intercultural speaker and a native speaker. In a sense native speakers are always developing and never stop learning but there are diminishing returns. By the time we reach 40, 50, and 60 the number of new words you learn is probably 2 or 3 a year, so you never stop learning as a native speaker, but it is minimal. Whereas I think as an intercultural person you always learn, you must always learn and always be willing to do that, otherwise you are not intercultural in attitude. So it is not a question of somebody who is a master/mistress of IC, who then is ready to teach, but of someone who has the attitude and is constantly learning.

 

To what extent is it possible to train or become an intercultural person without having direct intercultural experience, only classroom experience?

 

We could answer the question by thinking about what you have done today [a drama project with the pupils of a middle school]. I think drama is a very fruitful source for creating experience in the classroom which is intercultural, and it doesn’t have to be connected directly with a specific language. But if the classroom is a language-teaching classroom then you would set up a situation which is connected with the language, a variation of a drama that we have done today. But there are also some interesting ideas where people are using the internet. I mean older learners questioning each other over the internet, doing a kind of ethnographic study over the internet, and that can only develop further, I am sure. However, that also has to be thought about carefully because otherwise it can just turn out to be ‘pen pals’, which of course lasts for a few weeks. It is not just a question of ‘pen pals’.

 

The policy declared by the Council of Europe, and numerous projects supported in the EU, aims at helping to preserve less commonly spoken languages and minority cultures. This is clearly linked to developing one’s sense of regional identity. On the other hand, the present symposium is devoted to another recently popular concept of European citizenship. Is there a contradiction?

 

The title of the symposium was simply Intercultural Competence and Education for Citizenship. No, I do not think there is a contradiction, because European citizenship is an additional identity, it is not a substitute for anything. In experience I have found, and other people have told me that they have had the same experience that it is the same for all identities - it is when you leave them behind that you recognise them, you realise that you have got them. So the first time you realise you are Polish is probably the first time you go outside Poland, and people say, ‘Oh, you are Polish, how interesting.’ The first time I realised I was European was when I went outside Europe. Within Europe I was English or British. It was my first experience of going to Asia, which was not so long ago, ten years. I went to Hong Kong and I realised that I was in a very small minority of Europeans. So you walk in the streets of Hong Kong and you kind of see, feel, the very small number of people like yourself. And sometimes you look at people you have never seen before, a split second and there is a sense of ‘Oh yes we are Europeans and all others are Asians.’

 

Could you explain the concept of European citizenship as understood by the Council of Europe?

 

The Council of Europe does not use the phrase European Citizenship. It is the European Union that talks about European Citizenship. In the EU perspective it is above all the citizenship of status: rights, obligations, the right to vote and so on as a legal status; whereas we in our academic discussion, such as in this symposium, would want to make it an identity status in the sense of a citizenship of identity. The Council of Europe does not use that phrase. It talks about developing democratic citizenship in Europe, obviously in Europe because it is the Council of Europe. It cannot say anything about the outside of Europe. In practice it seems that the Council of Europe’s work is influential outside Europe. So to say democratic citizenship in Europe is really a tautology.

 

But, what do I think it is? Well, it is a social identity. It can be one that people acquire, maybe for some people it already is a social identity. A definition of social identity is a sense of identification with a group and the recognition of the other members that you are a member of that group. That’s technically what European identity is, and therefore it is identification with Europeans as a group and being recognised by other Europeans as a member. Now, that is a very big group, 800 million Europeans according to the Council of Europe. A big group to identify with and be recognised by, but in principle that is what it is. It is like all social identities, like the social identity of being Polish, or English, or a social identity of being a teacher. It is something that does not happen to you suddenly because of the process of socialisation that goes on - gradually you are socialised into being, learn to be Polish. You learn to be Polish, you learn to be a teacher, through various institutional and other means.

 

How would you see the role of a foreign language teacher in developing European identity or educating learners for democratic citizenship?

 

I certainly see a role for democratic citizenship. It is the role any teacher should have of developing in people a willingness and an ability to be critical, critical in the proper sense - not to be negatively critical, but to be analytically critical, and to be reflective and think about their lives. And the advantage for the foreign language teacher is that you are able to reflect on your own life and you can see it from somebody else’s perspective. And that is what foreign language teaching can do, it brings you another perspective alongside other teachers’ perspectives.

 

It is a different matter whether foreign language teachers should develop European identity. In the sense of an identity of feeling, as used in our symposium, i.e. a feeling of being part of the group of Europeans as opposed to just being a European by status, by right to vote, etc in the EU. Personally, I think he should, but that is for an individual teacher to decide.

 

The first task is a function of being a teacher. A good teacher is somebody who makes you think critically about yourself whichever subject you are teaching. The second task about developing identity is a political decision. I personally would say that the sense of belonging to and feeling that you are one of 800 million Europeans, difficult though it might be, is a good thing when it has prevented to some extent the conflicts we have had in the past within Europe.

 

Symposium on INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE AND EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP

School of Education, University of Durham, UK

24-26 March 2003