La escuela Fidencio Cantú González y el Programa de intervención educativa para niñas y niños indígenas que asisten a escuelas generales.

All teachers have their own teaching philosophies, which will be intentionally brought into their teaching practice and substantially affect their teaching outcomes, so it is important for teachers to reflect on their own principles in order to make their purpose explicit to others. The teacher of the Intercultural English Course (IEC) is also the researcher in this study and as such it is significant to disclose what informs her teaching. Thus, a personal statement of teaching

philosophy follows and the first person is used to represent the voice of the teacher not the researcher.

4.2.1.1 Lifelong learner and researcher

As an EFL teacher, I stick to the belief that I am a lifelong learner and researcher, which was initiated from my previous experiences in action research projects, and on top of this, lifelong learning is the philosophy of both my teaching and learning. I believe that learning a foreign language is a lifelong process, particularly with an objective to achieve intercultural competence. To expect a language teacher to be familiar with every aspect of intercultural knowledge and skills is impossible. Good teachers are themselves students, and often look for channels to expand upon their existing knowledge and broaden their views. In China, we have a proverb called ‘jiao xue xiang zhang (教学相长)’, which means both the teacher and the student learn from each other, and students’ knowledge can also supplement and enhance teachers’. Teachers are lifelong learners in a continuous process of self-reflection and self-evaluation.

My background as an EFL teacher and a researcher in the field of intercultural studies allows me to blend intercultural facets into the language teaching practice and provides learners with opportunities to become acquainted with relationships between culture and language. In addition, my English language learning experiences in China and Britain facilitate my understanding about EFL students’ needs and interests. Cooper and Chattergy (1998:125) assert that if educators understand the complexity of their own experiences due to cultural influences and realize that they negotiate cultural complexity in their own lives, they can bring increasing awareness and cultural sensitivity to their instructional activities and their interactions with students. All the teaching and learning experiences inside and outside my own cultural background enforce and empower me to constantly reflect on my teaching practice as well as learners’ learning process. For me, a competent intercultural EFL teacher is concerned about a lifelong professional development. Similarly, the theoretical and practical aspects implemented in the

IEC are the outcome of my former decades of language learning and teaching practice.

4.2.1.2 Teacher and learners’ roles

The IEC course intends to integrate an intercultural approach to foreign language education and this creates requirements for the specific roles that the teacher and learners take in the EFL classroom. Burns (2000:457) argues that the most appropriate type of classroom in which to operate the teacher-researcher strategy would be an ‘informal’ classroom. Here ‘informal’ means a relatively high degree of autonomy for students, a flexible approach towards time allocation in different areas of the curriculum and a relatively high priority given to work in which students interpret meaning and context in their own individual ways. The ‘informal’ classroom, which Burns proposes from an action research perspective, shares common features with that in an intercultural language teaching approach. The traditional roles of teacher and learner as merely providers and receivers of knowledge have been replaced by facilitators and active learners. The following paragraphs illustrate radical changes implemented in the IEC regarding teacher and learners’ roles in the Chinese context of EFL teaching and learning.

Currently, the majority of EFL classrooms in China are still dominated by a teacher-centred, examination-oriented and linguistic-proficiency-based atmosphere. Students are trained for the most part in terms of making up sentences, reciting grammar rules and translating passages, but, after years of tedious learning even those who are considered top students are not sufficiently competent in intercultural communication practices. Hence EFL teachers are encouraged to allow learners abundant freedom in their learning in order to assist them in being transformed from ‘slave of language’ into ‘master of language’. In an intercultural language classroom, students are not passive recipients of knowledge but should be greatly inspired and be active engagers in the learning process. McDevitt (2004:3) states that ‘the end product of all education should be an independent learner’. Teachers therefore need to provide opportunities for students to transform from passive to active learning.

The EFL teaching profession increasingly emphasizes a student-centred approach, and the teacher’s perceived role as facilitator or mediator is essential in facilitating learners’ ICC development. It is necessary for the teacher to adopt a non-dictatorial post, while still providing necessary guidance when learners encounter problems. Byram, Gribkova, and Starkey (2002: 13) say that ‘the role of the language teacher is to develop skills, attitudes and awareness of values just as much as to develop knowledge of a particular culture or country’. Savignon and Sysoyev (2000: 358) also state that learning culture is not the mere study of ‘isolated historical and geographical facts, holiday customs and food preferences’ of target cultures. Therefore, a foreign language class is expected to be a place where sufficient opportunities are provided for learners to raise their awareness of cultural differences, reflect critically on misunderstanding cases caused by inherent stereotypical perceptions, and then gradually improve their intercultural communication competence. Further, Byram et al (2002: 16) further indicate that the teacher does not need to be an expert in the target culture. Instead, he or she should be able to design in-class activities such as discussions on comparative analysis between learner’s own cultural values and the target ones.

In this regard, Pulverness (2004) maintains that the teacher has a vital role of being an intercultural mediator in a foreign language class. He or she is supposed to point out the cultural components or cultural connections overlooked or mis-conceptualized by the students. Byram (1997: 64) also recommends teachers to provide ‘corners and edges’ for the learners in order to assist them in completing ‘the socio-cultural puzzle’. Hence the teacher’s essential functions suggested here are guidance, facilitating and assistance.

Kubota (2002) too encourages teachers, as intellectuals, not merely to be ‘technicians of learner-centeredness’ and introduces the question of identity. That is to say, teachers are responsible for proposing broader perspectives about critical issues in the classroom. Particularly in the socio-cultural classroom, the identity of the learners does not remain fixed since their identity is influenced by the process of learning integrated with experiencing other ways of being and doing. For Risager (2006), the FL class creates culture and influences learners’ identity. Due to scarcity of cultural knowledge or immature inferences, students easily step into

an ‘improper’ space. At that moment teachers are highly encouraged to provide necessary guidance for learners to renegotiate the socio-cultural meaning and contextualize their presence in a ‘correct and comfortable’ stance. This is what Kramsch (1993) describes as a ‘third place’, where one creates a unique personal identity that is entirely one’s own as a result of the intercultural competence development.

In short, different from the traditional, the main role of the language teacher in the intercultural language teaching approach is to develop intercultural skills, attitudes and critical cultural awareness just as much as to develop cultural knowledge. The present challenge is how to construct a suitable syllabus in order to fulfil the teacher’s teaching philosophy step by step. The following section describes the Intercultural English Course (IEC) regarding its conceptual model, teaching contents and instruction methods, which is the enhancement of the EFL intercultural approach.