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 Maria Walat, a teacher trainer from Nauczycielskie Kolegium Języków Obcych (Foreign Language Teacher Training College), Bydgoszcz.

You have been working for a number of years on the idea of language and culture teaching. However, I think that what might be of interest is how you arrived at that idea and also some other activities you are involved in. As far as I know you were a teacher of French

 

Yes, I was a teacher of French and German.

But I also remember that I read something about Danish literature

 

Yes, I did my Ph.D. in Danish literature.

 

So, you studied French but you did your Ph.D. in Danish literature. How come?

 

At University I started in French and German and it was not difficult to start another language if you became interested. By chance I became interested in Danish. By the time I finished my degree I had started reading Danish literature and had done courses and exams in Scandinavian and Danish literature. In the course of that reading I became interested in a particular author. So by the end of my first degree, I had a degree in French, German and Danish because I did a bit of everything, both literature and language. And then I did my Ph.D. degree on this particular Danish author, full time. Then, I left the University, looked for a job and started teaching languages in an ordinary comprehensive secondary school in the south of England. Of course, I had to teach my French and German, and not Danish.

Then, how did it lead you to the idea of language and culture teaching? The first book I read was published in 1989, but I also remember that you had written a number of articles related to language and culture teaching. How was the idea of language and culture teaching conceived, then?

 

It is difficult really to remember, except that as a teacher of German and French I used to take children to Germany and France. I used to teach ordinary courses, and I had been teaching culture if you like, but in a traditional Landeskunde and Civilisation type of way. And then when I came here [School of Education, University of Durham], first I did some work on German minorities in Denmark, then I am not quite sure how I got involved. I suppose that it was that I was asked to write a chapter for a book which was being edited by a colleague here and he wanted other colleagues to write a chapter about unusual things. The book was called Sacred Cows in Education (1983). That gave me the stimulus I suppose, to write about something that had always been in my mind, i.e. “what is the purpose of language teaching?”. It was then that I began to say that the purpose is not just to teach language in a narrow sense. But when I was teaching in school I had written one or two short articles about the importance of culture teaching.

 

Yes, but then you began to draw on cultural studies

 

Yes, the British Cultural Studies Centre (in Birmingham). Well, I had begun to but in a way that was also a continuation because for my Ph.D. I studied the sociology of literature. I read Raymond Williams, I read Marxists, and I read Lucien Goldman, I read Escarpit. They wrote about the relation of literature to society. So, in a way, that was always there, as well. When, by chance, I started to get in contact with the British Studies people, who were then talking about cultural studies in a slightly different way. They were talking about it in Raymond Williams’ way and I suppose that this had always been in the back of my mind as well. But what I called cultural studies in 1989 was not what they were calling cultural studies.

 

You may not have done it in a direct way but to me there has always been this idea of cultural studies somewhere behind your writing. In one of your papers you talk in a definite way about the advantages and disadvantages of cultural studies in language teaching

 

Yes, but that was later, that was probably the chapter I wrote in Susan Bassnett’s book. In the meantime I had been working more and more with Susan Bassnett and that kind of network, and the similar network in Germany, Jürgen Kramer, and so on. People who were interested in cultural studies and Raymond Williams’ type of cultural studies. The network in Germany was very much in the tradition of Raymond Williams..... so, that came later when I began to sit in conferences with the British Cultural Studies people. And I would sit in conferences with language teaching people too and then I began to think about what these two networks had to say to each other. That is when I wrote a chapter in Susan Bassnett’s book (1997).

 

And now a question about some of your work connected with the Council of Europe. You have developed certain ideas connected with intercultural competence and you have written a number of articles on this notion. How has this come about? I know that you are also on the Advisory Board of the British Council. Have these type of activities influenced you in your thinking?

 

Maybe first about the British Studies Advisory Board of the British Council. I was invited to join that forum because I come from the pedagogy, didactics and methodology side of language teaching. In language teaching I have tried to combine language and culture teaching, whereas the other people on the Board, people like Susan Bassnett and Martin Montgomery, come from the perspective of how to study British culture. So I am there to combine as I am more involved with the theory of methodology.

With the Council of Europe, I am not sure whether that has influenced my thinking. Obviously, in a lot of practical matters but not in thinking. Originally, I was asked in the mid-eighties to write a paper for the Council of Europe to help the people who were at that time developing a Common European Framework for Languages in order to help them to think about how they could introduce the assessment of cultural competence, of what they called socio-cultural competence then, into the framework. They did not know how and they wanted somebody to tell them. I had also in the meantime started working with Geneviève Zarate and I said “OK, I will do it but only if I could invite Geneviève Zarate to work with me”. So, we wrote a paper for the Council of Europe on socio-cultural competence but we introduced the phrase of the intercultural speaker and eventually that word socio-cultural was replaced in the terminology of the Council of Europe, by ‘intercultural competence’.

 

But I have to say, and Geneviève has put it even more strongly, that what we wrote was changed, and what we wrote is not reflected exactly as we would want it in the Council of Europe Common European Framework. And I was not very happy with that, it happened before I became an advisor, and at that time I was just like any other person invited from time to time to give a view or to write a paper. In a way the Council of Europe’s thinking in the Common European Framework has not influenced us. I do not say it too often and too loudly, at the moment, but what is in the Common European Framework is unsatisfactory. The Common European Framework is not yet fixed and needs to be revised. Probably in a few years time we will revise it and improve it, I mean with reference to intercultural competence.

 

I have also found interesting the fact that you have become an editor. You have edited a number of collections of articles e.g. with Mike Fleming and also some other people. It means that in this way you have been disseminating ideas and, referring to the symposia that you have organised, you also try to draw people together and stimulate them. You are feeding your ideas to people (and vice versa) and then you also ask people to contribute to a collection you are editing. Could you comment on that, please?

Maybe it is a natural part of a stage of my career, if you like. In a sense, I have always worked, or nearly always, and written together with other people. A number of other books came out as a result of research projects, and research projects are always done in a team so it is the team that writes the book, and that is why a number of books have been written with other people, one or two or three people. And then in a way that is part of the dissemination of research. Another way of dissemination is to have seminars and I have put together papers from two seminars [with Michael Fleming]. They were fairly formal seminars, twenty-minute papers, ten-minute discussions, and on another occasion we, Mike and I, organised a kind of seminar like we have here [Symposium on Intercultural Competence and Education for Citizenship], with a workshop and so on. I see it as a part of my duty to use my experience to disseminate and bring people together.

 

To end I would like to say that my students read your books as they are in our Teacher Training College library and they find them very useful when they write their diploma projects. However, I know that sometimes they have problems reading them because these books are very advanced, but their ideas are not yet

That is nice to know but they should not just absorb them, they should also criticise them. I always say that to my own students because that is the danger: students do not criticise enough.

 

 

Maria Walat is a teacher trainer at Nauczycielskie Kolegium Językow Obcych in Bydgoszcz and has just completed her doctoral thesis: “Culture in a Language Classroom”

 

Symposium on INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE AND EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP

School of Education, University of Durham, UK

24-26 March 2003

 

Michael Byram - some important publications

His many publications on cultural learning in foreign language teaching include Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence and Young People Facing Difference. The latter, co-written with Geneviève Zarate, was produced within the Council of Europe’s project ‘language learning for European citizenship’. In 1997 he chaired Teaching Towards Intercultural Competence, an international conference in Sofia. Over a number of years he has participated in a wide range of British Studies projects in Europe, where his development of the concept, intercultural communicative competence, has been highly influential (British Studies Now 1998/10).

 

Byram, M. 1983. “Are modern languages useful? Are foreign languages useful?”. In Coffield, F. and Goodings, R. (eds). 1983 Sacred Cows in Education. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Byram, M. 1989. Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Byram, M. (ed.). 1994. Culture and Language Learning in Higher Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Byram, M. 1997. “’Cultural awareness’ in vocabulary learning”. Language Learning Journal 16. 51-57.

Byram, M. 1997. “Cultural studies and foreign language teaching”. In Bassnett, S. (ed.). 1997 Studying British Cultures. An Introduction. London: Routledge. 53-65.

Byram, M. 1997. Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon:

 Multilingual Matters

Byram, M. 1999. “Source disciplines for language teacher education”. In Trappes-Lomax, H. & McGrath, I. (eds). 1999. Theory in Language Teacher Education. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd. 70-81.

Byram, M. 2000. “Intercultural communicative competence: the challenge for language teacher training”. In Mountford, A. & Wadham-Smith, N. (eds). 2000. British Studies: Intercultural Perspectives.  Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited. 95-102.

Byram, M. & Esarte-Sarries, V. 1991. Investigating Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Teaching. A Book for Teachers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Byram, M. & Morgan, C. 1994. Teaching-and-Learning Language-and-Culture. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Byram, M. & Zarate, G. 1996. ”Defining and assessing intercultural competence: some principals and proposals for the European context”. Language Teaching 29/2. 239-243.

Byram, M. & Fleming, M. (eds). 1998. Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective. Cambridge: CUP.

Byram, M & Risager, K. 1998. Language Teachers, Politics and Cultures. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters