The international ELT conference in Durham gave the participants an opportunity to share their ideas and experiences of how to raise awareness of cultural similarities and differences in a foreign language classroom. The participants were in-service EFL teachers, teacher trainers, teacher educators and ELT policy makers from Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Colombia, Estonia, France , Germany, Greece, India, Iran, the Czech Republic, Israel, Latvia, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Swaziland, UK, Venezuela and Yemen.   

 

The event was organised as a number of seminars,  informed by morning presentations delivered by distinguished specialists in the field of intercultural studies, such as Michael Byram, John Corbett, and Alan Pulverness, along with materials developers and publishers Simon Greenall and Susan Holden.

 

The issues which were discussed were:

 

• intercultural communication
• designing the language/culture curriculum
• developing teaching materials
• evaluating and adapting existing materials
• assessing intercultural skills
• teaching young learners
• teacher development.

 

Michael Byram presented the possible problems that may arise when trying to assess intercultural communicative competence. In a presentation under the meaningful title of Testing the untestable? he offered an account of what intercultural skills could actually be assessed and how that could be done.

 

John Corbett ran a practical workshop on Intercultural awareness and language teaching, illustrating the meaning of intercultural awareness and its importance to foreign language learners. He presented examples of an intercultural project involving international students who exchange information on aspects of everyday language and culture using the Internet as a means of communication.

 

Simon Greenall and Susan Holden, in their individual presentations, brought home the problems of materials development and publishing, respectively. Thus, Simon Greenall talked about the practical aspects of planning a coursebook, targeting the audience, collecting data, selecting and designing materials, whereas Susan Holden talked about the roles and responsibilities of publishers.  

 

In the seminar sessions, participants worked in groups dealing with the key points of interest listed above in an attempt to work out practical specific guidelines for teacher trainers, in-service teachers and curriculum/materials designers on how to implement the idea of intercultural teaching into their respective fields of interest. The work ended with each group having an opportunity to share their output to the other groups in a plenary session, where the ideas were further discussed.

 

As a treat, the participants went on a trip to Beamish, County Durham, a 300-acre, open-air museum which on a stretch of beautiful countryside recreates life in the North of England in the early 1800s and 1900s. The visit was treated as an ethnographic experience, illustrating how individuals can discover or re-live history, learning about the lifestyle, customs and traditions of our ancestors – very much an element of intercultural teaching.

 

The conference was a very successful event, as the practical angle of the seminars opened the room to lively discussions, gave the participants a chance to analyse and compare their own teaching ideas and materials, with the benefit of the presentations which inspired group discussions. Another benefit for the participants is the prospect of further networking which was offered by Michael Houten of British Council Manchester, who set up an Internet Mind the Gap forum as an online spot for the exchange of ideas, materials and documents.