{"title":"Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence: The Perspective of Foreign Language Graduate Student Instructors","authors":"Carla M. Ghanem","doi":"10.20429/IJSOTL.2017.110209","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Cultural awareness and intercultural competence (IC) of students in foreign language (FL) instruction have been widely examined (e.g. Byram, 1997; Belz, 2002). The importance of the FL teacher in aiding students’ IC development is less extensively researched, however. Author (2014), Kohler (2015), Sercu et al. (2005) and Sercu (2006) are a few exceptions. The purpose of this study is to shed light on graduate student instructors’ (GSIs) perspective of understanding IC and its incorporation into FL courses. Eight GSIs of German at a large US university participated in this qualitative study, which addresses the struggles that these instructors encounter when attempting to understand and teach IC. Findings show that the GSIs do not fully comprehend the term of IC and hence have difficulty including IC in the classroom. This has implications for teacher training and professional development.","PeriodicalId":332019,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2017-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"13","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.20429/IJSOTL.2017.110209","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 13
Abstract
Cultural awareness and intercultural competence (IC) of students in foreign language (FL) instruction have been widely examined (e.g. Byram, 1997; Belz, 2002). The importance of the FL teacher in aiding students’ IC development is less extensively researched, however. Author (2014), Kohler (2015), Sercu et al. (2005) and Sercu (2006) are a few exceptions. The purpose of this study is to shed light on graduate student instructors’ (GSIs) perspective of understanding IC and its incorporation into FL courses. Eight GSIs of German at a large US university participated in this qualitative study, which addresses the struggles that these instructors encounter when attempting to understand and teach IC. Findings show that the GSIs do not fully comprehend the term of IC and hence have difficulty including IC in the classroom. This has implications for teacher training and professional development.
在外语教学中,学生的文化意识和跨文化能力(IC)得到了广泛的研究(如Byram, 1997;茨,2002)。然而,外语教师在帮助学生智能发展方面的重要性却没有得到广泛的研究。Author(2014)、Kohler(2015)、Sercu et al.(2005)和Sercu(2006)是少数例外。本研究的目的是阐明研究生导师(gsi)理解IC及其融入外语课程的观点。美国一所大型大学的八名德语gsi参与了这项定性研究,该研究解决了这些教师在试图理解和教授IC时遇到的困难。研究结果表明,gsi并不完全理解IC的术语,因此在课堂上包括IC方面存在困难。这对教师培训和专业发展有影响。