School of Education, University of Durham, UK

An overview

The guiding principle of the symposium was to work towards a 'conversation' on assessment of intercultural competence (IC). There were presentations of a number of projects in which assessment of IC seems to be fairly advanced or is being researched. These are projects which have been developed by groups of people (in case of the Canadian project 31 researches are involved) supported either by institutions or grants. On the other scale there were some individual presentations which identified some issues of relevance to IC (e.g. Phyllis Ryan who in her research identified intuitively successful people).

What immediately emerged from these presentations and discussions was that there were different disciplinary and national starting points with respect to IC. However, it is of great importance that in this way information on various projects and developments, e.g. on assessment procedures and instruments could be shared.

Some other points that seem to be of relevance:

• 'Awareness' is no longer a sufficient term to use when talking about a foreign culture and it was suggested that it should be replaced with 'respect'.

• Another distinction to be made with references to language teaching and education in general. It means that what has to be considered is the relation of the objectives of language teaching to humanistic education (both formal and informal). It has been suggested that by adopting broader educational aims respect for the mulitiplicity of identities of others will be developed. This could be done by the internationalisation of the curriculum.

• Humanistic aims for intercultural education are to develop: 1. specific skills, respect, knowledge and sensitivity towards people and cultures of another language; 2. general skills, respect, knowledge, sensitivity towards otherness where another language is used. It was pointed out that 'openness to otherness' cannot be prescribed.

• To what extent IV can be defined as a set of skills and which skills would they be?
• To what extent can IC be measured in such a way as to demonstrate an individual's improvement over time?
• There has to be willingness of part of the testee to be assessed and this raises ethical issues, which come to the fore within vocational education (Anne Davidson, Lund Intercultural Competence Assessment Project, Leonardo da Vinci project: European Training in the UK, http://www.incaproject.org)
• There should not be one way of assessing IC, any tendency towards standardisation was perceived as very worrying. This lends itself to the notion of de-centring where home culture being brought into relation with 'other' enables an individual to see own culture as a foreigner would.
• Stressed was place on the notion of self-assessment when one would be able to measure one's own progression of IC
• As assessment implies value judgement a model should be created in order to appreciate diversity (Manuela Guilherme)
• The challenge and the next step: to devise a system of assessment which is valid and reliable. The assessment as such is highly mechanistic whereas the role of assessment should be a way of refining one's notion of IC by feeding back.

Conclusion: It is of importance to promote IC. It has been agreed that there are areas within IC that cannot be assessed.

Points which need further consideration

• Would it be more appropriate to concentrate on self assessment rather that testing? The ethical issue comes to the focus here as one of the threats is the mis-use of assessment by employers
• What has to be faced in future is that hopefully the significance of intercultural competence and intercultural communicative competence will be accepted by societies therefore there will be a need to make these levels more clear, using not only specialist but also non-specialist notion

Presentations:

Contribution from Joe Shiels' and David Little's perspective of the Council of Europe on intercultural competence and specifications of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) where the crucial question was which were the best means of self-assessment of IC in the language passport [it has to noted here that a conference on ELP was organised in Poland 24 November 2001, the University of Warsaw, KJO French Department]

Presentation by Lies Sercu of existing approaches and techniques of assessing ICC (e.g. format that tests can take: closed one (multiple choice, quiz) and open one (essay, portfolio, think aloud procedure); individual tests and also tests where others are involved (role-play, interview, group work); self-directed assessment (portfolio, learner diary) and teacher-directed assessment (summative test at the end of a course). As far as the purpose of the test is concerned we have to distinguish between the form of self-assessment or tests to inform the teacher. [Here it seems to me that the first type should be valued higher as it means that a learner becomes aware of the hurdles connected with aiming at IC. In this way acquisition of cultural knowledge, attitudes, skills and respect are no longer of a vague nature].

What could be of further use are self-awareness inventories which are of use for exploring thinking patterns and styles of behaviour which are supposed to lead modifying these patterns and styles. They are of use in various contexts, e.g. Foreign service, educational settings like exchange programmes, Business and industry, Non-profit organisations to prepare volunteers to live and work abroad. There are also cross-cultural adaptability inventory which increase awareness of an individual of how people function cross-culturally.

Source: Fowler, S. M. & Mumford, M. G. (eds.) (1999) Intercultural sourcebook: Crosscultural training methods. Vol. 2. Yarmouth: Intercultural Press.

In order to measure levels of intercultural development the six scales of the intercultural development inventory (Bennet 1993) are used. The latter measures orientations towards cultural differences. Two broad categories are proposed to interpret cultural difference termed as 'ethnocentric' (one's own culture view of the world as central to all reality) and 'ethnorelative' (particular cultures can only be understood within a cultural context). In order to measure the first one there are three scales of the denial, defence and minimisation. To assess the ethnorelative orientation the acceptance, cognitive adaptation, and behavioural adaptation scale are used. [It seems that research is needed to establish the levels of these two orientations towards cultural differences in Polish learners. What could be suggested here that this is carried out as a two stage process. Student teachers at NKJOs are introduced to that and later on within their teaching practice they carry out their own research.

Source:

• Bennet, M.J. (1986) Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R.M. Paige (ed.) Cross-cultural orientation: New conceptualisations and applications. New York: University Press of America.
• Bennet, M.J. (1993) Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural       sensitivity. In R.M. Paige (ed.) Education for the intercultural experience. Yarmouth: Intercultural Press, 21-71.

The Interculture Project presented by Robert Crawshaw (Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University). The aim of the project is to prepare and give support for a period of residence abroad. It includes learning activities, intercultural incidents, quizzes, and reflection on experience.

• The website: www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture
• Students when back are assessed on the bases of a summative essay (80%). Marks are given both the language and content. Criteria are specified.
• To me of interest was an academic programme included in the file on Border Crossings: Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe. The aim of the course is to challenge suppositions about European and national identities and enable students to gain insights into the complexity and interrelated character of European cultures. This is done by examining novels and films from the last 25 years which tackle problems of the crossing of geographical and linguistic borders, and the subject of migration, exile, memory and forgetting.

The Canadian Research Project was presented which is in its Phase 1, i.e. development and validation of the survey instruments. The problem to be researched has been stated as follows: world-wide communications increases, geographical borders cease to exist but can the same be said about cultural borders and the construct of one's cultural representations towards others and other cultures? The project is run in collaboration with the European project on Cultural Mediation and the Teaching and Learning of a Language funded by the European Centre for Modern Languages and the Council of Europe.

The distance learning project for Bulgarian teachers. The presentation stressed that from the very beginning it was sensed that assessment was to be highly problematic and it should be related to the content of cultural learning.

Future action

The above-mentioned projects show how advanced work on intercultural competence is in other countries than Poland. In the light of the above it seems that assessment of intercultural competence is at the end of the list of language teaching objectives. Therefore, there is much to be done in future with the respect to the assessment of IC. 

Long term goals:

·         What should be done is to work towards IC by implementing intercultural thinking into syllabus design of language teaching. Not to speak about all school subjects.

·         Links can be established with cultural pedagogy departments where an intercultural perspective prevails, e.g. Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, Bialystok University

·         Teacher qualifications for intercultural foreign language teaching should be brought to the fore (see points specified by Edelhoff, in Sercu (1998, Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective Byram M. and Fleming. M. CUP; pp. 256-257).

Short term goals:

·         Involvement of both student teachers and teachers into research (e.g. assessment of ethnocentric and ethnorelative attitude)

·         In order for NKJO to become aware of the problems connected with intercultural competence I have designed my syllabus around concepts like otherness or imagined community. I attach my attempted presentation on the assessment of the end-of-the-semester project that I prepared for the symposium.