Tercer Trámite Constitucional: Cámara de Diputados

As a step towards describing teaching and assessment, Byram defined skills, knowledge, attitudes and critical cultural awareness in terms of objectives (Byram, 1997). These were applied in the ICC learning/teaching and assessment in the study intervention:

Byram (1997) was concerned with attitudes such as curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one‘s own, and defined these in terms of objectives as follows:

 ―Willingness to seek out or take up opportunities to engage with otherness in a relationship of equality; this should be distinguished from attitudes of seeking out the exotic or of seeking to profit from others;

 Interest in discovering other perspectives on interpretation of familiar and unfamiliar phenomena both in one‘s own and in other cultures and cultural practices;

 Willingness to question the values and presuppositions in cultural practices and product in one‘s own environment;

 Readiness to experience the different stages of adaptation to and interaction with another culture during a period of residence;

 Readiness to engage with the conventions and rites of verbal and non-verbal communication and interaction‖ (p. 50).

According to Byram (1997), in the classroom, these attitudes are sometimes reflected in students‘ willingness to improvise when they use language, or in their question at the end of the lesson about something noticed in a textbook, or in the student who talks about what they have learned from other sources about another country.

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Knowledge of social groups and their products and practices in one‘s own and in one‘s interlocutor‘ country, and of general processes of societal and individual interaction, was defined in terms of objectives as follows:

 ―Historical and contemporary relationships between one‘s own and one‘s interlocutor‘s countries;

 The means of achieving contact with interlocutors from another country (at a distance or in proximity), of travel to and from and the institutions which facilitate contact or help resolve problems;

 The types of cause and process of misunderstanding between interlocutors of different cultural origins;

 The national memory of one‘s own country and how its events are related to and seen from the perspective of one‘s interlocutor‘s country;

 The national memory of one‘s interlocutor‘s country and the perspective on it from one‘s own;

 The national definitions of geographical space in one‘s own country and how these are perceived from the perspective of other countries;

 The national definitions of geographical space in one‘s interlocuter‘s country and the perspective on them from one‘s own.

 The process and institutions of socialization in one‘s own and one‘s interlocutor‘s country

 Social distinctions and their principal markers, in one‘s own country and one‘s interlocutor‘s

 Institutions, and perceptions of them, which impinge on daily life within one‘s own and one‘s interlocutor‘s country and which conduct and influence relationships between them

 The processes of social interaction in one‘s interlocutor‘s country‖ (p. 51).

According to Byram (1997), part of the knowledge an intercultural speaker needs is: to be aware that ―one is a product of one‘s own socialization‖ and it is ―a pre-condition for understanding one‘s reactions to otherness‖; to be aware of ―how one‘s natural ways of interacting with other people are the naturalised product of socialization‖, and to be aware of ―how parallel but different modes of interaction can be expected in other cultures‖ (p. 51).

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Skills of interpreting and relating including the ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one‘s own were defined in terms of objectives as follows:

 ―Identify ethnocentric perspectives in a document or event and explain their origins;  Identify areas of misunderstanding and dysfunction in an interaction and explain them

in terms of each of the cultural systems present;

 Mediate between conflicting interpretations of phenomena‖ (p. 52)

According to Byram (1997), an intercultural speaker should be able to recognize how two people are misunderstanding each other because of their different ethnocentrisms, no matter how linguistically competent they are and how able they are to identify and explain the pre- suppositions in a statement. Documents describing another culture such as television reports, touring brochures, autobiographical travellers‘ tales, or even language learning textbooks may claim to give an impartial or objective account. To develop the skills of reading such documents and to identify the sometimes insidious and unconscious effects of ethnocentrism, one should learn knowledge about ways in which ethnocentric perspectives are socially produced.

Skills of discovery and interaction including the ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction were defined in terms of objectives as follows:

 ―Elicit from an interlocutor the concepts and values of documents or events and to develop an explanatory system susceptible of application to other phenomena;

 Identify significant references within and across cultures and elicit their significance and connotations;

 Identify similar and dissimilar process of interaction, verbal and non-verbal, and negotiate an appropriate use of them in specific circumstances;

 Use in real-time an appropriate combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes to interact with interlocutors from a different country and culture, taking into consideration the degree of one existing familiarity with the country and culture and the extent if difference between one‘s own and the other;

 Identify contemporary and past relationships between one‘s own and the other culture and country;

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 Identify and make use of public and private institutions which facilitate contact with other countries and cultures;

 Use in real-time knowledge, skills and attitudes for mediation between interlocutors of one‘s own and a foreign culture‖ (p. 53).

According to Byram (1997), these are the skills which people need to establish an understanding of a new culture environment. With these skills, people will become able to interact in richer and more complex ways with people whose culture is unfamiliar to them. Byram notes that through a foreign correspondent of a newspaper or television station, one can develop these skills, discovering the streams of thought, power, and influence underlying the events which he/she reports on.

Critical cultural awareness such as an ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one‘s own and other cultures and countries was defined in terms of objectives as follows:

 ―Identify and interpret explicit or implicit values in documents and events in one‘s own and other countries;

 Make an evaluative analysis of the documents and events which refers to an explicit perspective and criteria;

 Interact and mediate in intercultural exchanges in accordance with explicit criteria, negotiating where necessary a degree of acceptance of them by drawing upon one‘s knowledge, skills and attitudes‖ (p.53).

The important point Byram (1997) stresses here is that the intercultural speaker brings ―a rational and explicit evaluative standpoint‖ to the experiences of his/her own and other cultures. According to him, although for ethical reasons the teacher may not wish to interfere in their students‘ views, they can still encourage them to identify and reflect on the basis for their judgements of their own society as well as of others.

Byram‘s specified objectives can be used in planning teaching and assessment of ICC. As he notes: ―The model shall help foreign language teachers to plan more deliberately than they often do, to include intercultural competence in their pedagogical aims. This focus on planning originated in research showing that teachers intend to include a cultural dimension but do so only intermittently and in unplanned ways (Byram, Esarte-Sarries, & Taylor, 1991)‖ (Byram, 2009, p. 324). In Byram and his colleagues‘s research (1991), they find that language teachers believe that knowledge of the grammatical system of a language has to be

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complemented by learning culture aspects, however, the source of these theories seems to be less evident as they impart meanings of culture aspects. This is in line with (see Section 2.2.3) Sun‘s keynote speech (2013), with Han & Song‘s (2011) findings that Chinese university English teachers‘ conceptualization of ICC and its relevance to ELT is vague in spite of their strong desire to develop students‘ ICC and with my own 20 years‘ experience in teaching English in universities in China. The specified objectives provides a basis for teachers to ―to plan and to develop an integrated didactic of intercultural linguistic competences‖ and for this study intervention to systematically plan and integrate ICC teaching/learning into EFL classroom. The specified objectives help me not only in planning and teaching ICC, but also in evaluating if I have achieved my intentions and assessing students‘ ICC competence. With objectives, according to Byram (2009), the teacher can evaluate if she or he has achieved her or his intentions. Objectives can also provide the foundation for assessment of the students‘ competence.

The above definitions of attitudes, knowledge and skills in terms of objectives made by Byram (1997) became applicable to the teaching and assessment in this study. However, when I designed the curriculum and taught it, I used them analytically and selectively, adapting them to the specific circumstance- of my context. In each of the three phases, phase one for developing critical awareness and attitudes, phase two for learning knowledge, phase three for developing learning skills and critical awareness, I related those objectives in a relevant way to each phase. The relevance and applicability of Byram‘s model will be further discussed in the discussion and conclusion chapters of this study.