Pedagogical practice for integrating the intercultural

in language teaching and learning

Anthony J. Liddicoat

Languages education is increasingly emphasising the place of the development of

intercultural abilities in the teaching and learning of languages, and such requirements
are now common curriculum documents around the world. This change in emphasis
has posed some challenges for the ways in which language teachers work. For some
teachers, language and culture have been seen as separate areas of teaching and
learning and the focus on the intercultural is seen as a movement away from language.
For others, however, language and culture are seen as fundamentally integrated and
the focus on the intercultural represents a way of refocusing language teaching and
learning to reflect this integration. Such an integrated approach means that the
intercultural can be included in the languages curriculum, without a movement away
from a language focus. This paper will examine ways in which language curriculum
and practice can be understood from an intercultural perspective in a way which
focuses on the intercultural and maintains language learning at the heart of the
curriculum.

Introduction
The intercultural dimension of language learning have become an important
dimension of language learning and much recent work in many countries has focused
on this (for example, Bartolomé, 1995; Bolten, 1993; Byram, 1997; Byram & Zarate,
1994; Candau, 2000; Cerezal, 1999; Kramsch, 1991, 1993, 1995a; Liddicoat, 2002;
Terranova, 1997.; van Kalsbeek & Huizinga, 1997; Zarate, 1986). This work has
begun a paradigm shift in the ways in which language education is understood,
moving away from a code-based understanding of the nature of language to a view of
language as culturally contexted meaning making. When language education begins
to focus on meaning making, issues of interculturality become primary in the ways in
which language learning is constructed. Second language communication is
intercultural communication. When a person uses their second language they are
encoding ideas in a linguistic system which is located within a cultural context and
which will be interpreted as being located within that context. Language learners have
to engage with culture as they communicate and to learn the cultural contexts which
frame communication and interpretation (Liddicoat, 1997a; , 1997b; , 2002). This
paper will explore the idea of intercultural pedagogy in language education,
exemplified by a case study drawn from Japanese language teaching and leanirng.

Intercultural language teaching and learning: Some

basic assumptions
The ultimate goal of language teaching and learning is to be able to communicate in
another language.Communication is not however just a question of grammar and
vocabulary, it is also a question of culture (Crozet 1996).Every message a human
being communicates through language is communicated in a cultural context.Cultures
shape the ways language is structured and the ways in which language is used.A
language learner who has learnt only the grammar and vocabulary of a language is,
therefore, not well equipped to communicate in that language.

When people begin to communicate messages in another language, they not only
begin to exploit language functions, they also begin to function within a cultural
context.As such, learners require cultural knowledge as much as they require
grammar and vocabulary.Quite often native speakers can be tolerant of problems of
grammar or vocabulary, but problems of cultural mismatch often create significant
problems for communication and for social relationships, largely because people are
much less aware of their cultural rules for interaction than they are of other aspects of
language.

Cultural knowledge is not something that learners can just pick up.In fact, cultural
differences may often go unnoticed by learners until they actually create a problem
(Crozet and Liddicoat 1999).If learners are going to develop their cultural knowledge
about the target language group, they need to be helped to notice when their culture
differs from that of others and they need to notice this before it create problems.This
then is where language teachers need to use explicit teaching to draw their students’
attention to culture and the ways in which varying cultures work. Often culture has
been considered to be some sort of fifth macro-skill (for example, Damen, 1987),
which is introduced once the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing have
been established.At its most extreme, this view considers culture as something that
learners will pick up by themselves when they go to the foreign country. Quite often
in language text books there is a separate section reserved for culture and often these
‘cultural notes’ section focus on aspects of culture which are not closely linked to
language itself, such as festivals or arts.These notes, while interesting, are not usually
the elements of culture that learners typically experience difficulty with.In fact, text
books often seem to ignore cultural information which might be very important for
learners in interactions with native speakers (Hanamura, 1998; Liddicoat, 1999).

Because culture is integrated closely with language, quite simple language can often
be bound up with quite complex culture (Liddicoat, 1999)This is the case, for
example, with things like the different ways European languages us pronouns for
‘you’ or Japanese uses plain, neutral or honorific verb forms.In these cases, the formal
grammar involved is not exceptionally complex, but without a good understanding of
the culture in which the forms are used it is impossible to use the forms
correctly.Explanations that one form is more polite than another are not really helpful,
because often what is involved can be a different idea of politeness (Wierzbicka,
1985).

Because culture is fundamental to language, there is a need to start teaching culture at

the very beginning of language teaching.Even very simple language such as greetings,
meal time formulae or the choice of a pronoun is heavily culturally laden and this
needs to addressed when these aspects of language are taught.If teaching the culture is
left until later, learners will have created an understanding of context for the language
they are learning — an understanding they will later have to unlearn.Language is not
learnt in a cultural vacuum which can be filled in later, rather learners create their own
cultural assumptions as they learn.An absence of input about culture does not leave a
vacant cultural space which can be filled in later.Rather, it leads to a cultural space
which is filled by uninformed and unanalysed assumptions based on assumptions and
understandings from the learners’ first culture.

In developing an approach to language teaching which focuses on intercultural

communication, consideration needs to be given to the sort of speaker language
teaching intends to create.In the past, language teaching has usually aimed at making
the learner as much like a native speaker of the language as possible (Kramsch,
1999a).This is both an unrealistic goal, in that language teaching hardly ever achieves
it, and also an inappropriate one. It is inappropriate because it does not reflect the
social and cultural reality of using a second language.When someone speaks in their
second language, they do not abandon their own thoughts, feelings and values and
assimilate themselves to the thoughts, feelings and values of their interlocutors
(Byram & Zarate, 1994), instead they reach an accommodation between their own
culture and personality and the new culture.

Instead of aiming for a native speaker norm, language teaching can more profitably
aim for a bilingual norm: that is developing a speaker who is comfortable and capable
in an intercultural context.Bilingual speakers’ needs are different from those of
monolinguals (Crozet, Liddicoat, & Lo Bianco, 1999; Kramsch, 1999a). Bilinguals
need to navigate between the languages and cultures they know and they need to
create identities for themselves which work in these contexts.In order to become
competent bilinguals, learners need to know what native speakers mean when they
adopt certain behaviours but they do not have to reproduce these behaviours in the
same way.This means teachers have to think about ‘productive competence’ and
‘receptive competence’ separately (Kasper, 1998).As receivers of language, second
language users need to be able to understand what native speakers mean in native
speaker-like ways.As producers of language, however, many second language users
do not want to behave in native speaker-like ways, may not feel comfortable doing so,
or may not need to do so.

To work most effectively, language learning needs to allow opportunities for learners
to reflect on their own language and culture.Most learners have not had opportunities
to learn about the ways in which their own culture works and how their own language
reflects their culture.Without this knowledge it is difficult to come to terms with a
different culture.The most important cultural learning that can come about in the
language classroom is learning that cultures are relative not absolute.Learning about
another culture provides an opportunities for comparison with one’s own culture and
provides opportunities for learning which goes beyond the traditional aims of
language learning.In situations where language learning may be too limited for
learners to develop high levels of language proficiency, a deeper understanding of
one’s own culture and the ways in which cultures vary may be the most long-lasting
outcome of language learning (Crozet, Liddicoat, & Lo Bianco, 1999).

It is true that it is impossible to teach everything about culture.Cultures are complex

things and they vary from person to person, from group to group and over time.There
is no way to transmit such a complex and dynamic thing in a classroom.What we can
do in the classroom is help learners develop ways of finding out more about the
culture they are learning by analysing their experiences and developing their
awareness.
Towards a pedagogy of intercultural language
learning
An interculturally oriented approach to language teaching and learning has a constant
concern for two key dimensions of language teaching practice. The first of these is
that language, culture and learning are fundamentally integrated (Byram & Feng,
2005; Byram & Zarate, 1994; Kramsch, 1995b, 1999b; Liddicoat, Papademetre,
Scarino, & Kohler, 2003). This means that in developing a pedagogy of intercultural
teaching and learning it is necessary to recognised the classroom as a cultural context
in which teachers’ and learners’ experiences and expectations are shaped by the
linguistic and cultural backgrounds that each brings to the classroom. Each participant
in the class enacts through language his/her understanding and assumptions about
fundamental aspects of practice such as what constitutes learning, what constitutes
knowledge and how knowledge is to be displayed or used. This means that an
important starting point for developing an intercultural pedagogy is for teachers
individually to recognise the cultural locatedness of the ways they think about
teaching and learning. Such recognition allows teachers to come to understand the
motivation and conceptual underpinnings for their own action as teachers and how
they themselves mediate between cultural assumptions in their work.

The second important dimension of an intercultural language pedagogy is the

recognition that there are always at least two languages at play at every moment: the
target language and the first language(s) of the students (Kramsch, 1999a). Each
language constructs the world in particular ways and carries embedded
understandings of the nature of that world. This can happen even at the most basic
levels of language, as the following extract from an interaction between an Australia
student and a Japanese native-speaker teacher demonstrates.

Text: 信号は青になった。
S: Are traffic lights a different colour in Japan?
T: No. They’re the same.
S: But it says here that the light turned aoi.
T: Yes. That’s right. And then the cars go. What happens next?

This extract shows at a simple level the presence of multiple language systems at play
in a single interaction – in this case leading to a problem in comprehension. The
problem here stems from a mapping of a Japanese lexical item aoi onto an English
word blue and onto the conceptual system which underlies the English word – the
conceptual boundaries of what can be termed blue. For an English speaker the
conceptual field occupied by the word blue can never include the colour of a traffic
light. This prompts the student’s first question. The teacher’s answer here confirms
the real world similarity between traffic lights but does not explain the conceptual
mismatch the student is experiencing. This leads to a further attempt to negotiate the
problem in which the student uses textual evidence to restate the conceptual problem.
Here, the student uses the word aoi, which for the Japanese speaker invokes a
conceptual system which includes the colour of traffic lights as a possible member.
The Japanese speaker responds according to the conceptual system associated with
aoi, although the student’s problem is based on the conceptual system associated with
the word blue, which moreover is never actually brought to the surface in the
interaction.
The cultural interrelationships in language exist not only on the lexical level as in the
example above, but pervade the entire communicative repertoire of language. They
influence perceptions of non-literal meanings of speech acts, judgements of whether
of not a particular linguistic structure is polite or not in a particular context, whether a
text is elegantly written or illogically structured, etc. (Liddicoat, in press; Wierzbicka,
1985). The multiple languages existing in the classroom therefore make possible
multiple interpretations of any instance of language use, in any language. The
recognition that multiple languages are always present in the language classroom is
not simply a pre-requisite for developing an intercultural pedagogy; rather an
intercultural pedagogy is fundamentally based in the recognition of such diversity. It
involves developing understandings of the way in which this recognition influences
the process of communication within their own language and culture and across
languages and cultures.

Language education, especially communicative language teaching, has often

attempted to hide the fact of the multilingualism of the language classroom, by acting
as if the language classroom were a monolingual target language environment and by
attempting to exclude the learners’ own language as a much as possible. In such
approaches to teaching, the students’ existing language knowledge is seen as a
problem or the acquisition of the new language which must be overcome through the
proscription of that language. In reality, however, it is never possible for a
multilingual person to suspend the relevance of his/her complete language knowledge
in any interaction. For a multilingual person his/her entire linguistic repertoire is
always potentially available and always affects their perceptions of the events they
encounter. The monolingualism of many language classrooms is a best a fiction and at
worst a denial of the identities and cultural realities of both the teachers and the
learners.

An intercultural pedagogy is one which engages actively with the interrelatedness of

language culture and learning and with the multiple languages and cultures present in
the classroom which shape learners and learning. This involves developing with
students an understanding of their own situatedness in their own language and culture,
and the recognition of the same in others.

Intercultural language learning involves developing with learners an

understanding of their own language(s) and culture(s) in relation to an
additional language and culture. It is a dialogue that allows for reaching a
common ground for negotiation to take place, and where variable points
of view are recognised, mediated, and accepted.
Learners engaged in intercultural language learning develop a reflective
stance towards language and culture, both specifically as instances of first,
second, and additional languages and cultures, and generally as
understandings of the variable ways in which language and culture exist in
the world. (Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino, & Kohler, 2003, p. 46)

Fundamentally, through intercultural language learning students engage with and

learn to understand and interpret human communication and interaction in
increasingly sophisticated ways. They do so both as participants in communication,
and as observers, who notice, describe, analyse and interpret ideas, experiences,
feelings shared when communicating with others. In doing so they engage with
interpreting self and other’s meanings, with each experience of participation and
reflection leading to a greater awareness of self in relation to others. The ongoing
exchange of meanings in interaction and reflecting both on the meanings exchanged
and the process of interaction are an integral part of life in our world. As such,
intercultural language learning is best understood not as something to be added to
teaching and learning but rather, something that is integral to the interactions that
already and inevitably take place in the classroom and beyond.

Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino and Kohler (2003) propose a set of principles which
provide a starting point for developing intercultural language learning. They are as
follows:

1. Active Learning involves purposeful, active, engagement in

construction: interpreting and creating meaning in interaction with others,
and continuously reflecting on one’s self and others in
communication and meaning-making in variable contexts.
For students, it is more than a process of absorption of facts
but continuously developing as thinking, feeling, changing
intercultural beings.
2. Making Learning is developed firstly through social interactions, that
connections: is, interpersonally and then internally within the mind of the
individual, that is intrapersonally. In the interpersonal
process previous knowledge is challenged and it is the
challenge to initial conceptions that creates new insights
through which students connect, re-organise, elaborate,
extend their understanding. In this process constant
connections are made between:
 language and culture and learning
 existing conceptions – new understandings
 language and thinking
 first language – additional language(s)
 previous experiences – new experiences.
3. Interaction: Learning and communication are social and interactive;
interacting and communicating interculturally means
continuously developing one’s own understanding of the
relationship between one’s own framework of language and
culture and that of others. In interaction participants engage
in a continuous dialogue in negotiating meaning across
variable perspectives held by diverse participants, and
continuously learn from and build upon the experience.
4. Reflection: Learning involves becoming aware of how we think, know
and learning about language (first and additional), culture,
knowing, understanding and their relationship as well as
concepts such as diversity, identity, experiences and one’s
own intercultural thoughts and feelings.
5. Responsibility: Learning depends on learner’s attitudes, dispositions and
values, developed over time; specifically in communication
 it involves accepting responsibility for one’s way of
interacting with others within and across languages and for
striving continuously to better understand self and others in
the ongoing development of intercultural sensitivity.

These principles amount to constructivist theory of learning applied to the context of

the intercultural as manifested through language. They are therefore starting points for
an intercultural pedagogy not an intercultural pedagogy itself. Each of these principles
requires development into practice. This practice can be conceptualised as a series of
four interrelated processes of noticing, comparing, reflecting and interacting (Figure
1).

Noticing Comparing

Interacting Reflecting

Figure 1: Interacting processes of intercultural pedagogy

The process of noticing is fundamental to learning (Schmidt, 1993). In intercultural

language learning, it is important for learners to notice cultural similarities and
differences as they are made evident through language as this is a central element in
intercultural learning beyond the classroom. When experiencing something new,
learners need to examine the new information in their own terms and seek to
understand what it is they are experiencing. Noticing, however, is not necessarily a
naturally occurring activity for learners in the classroom. Rather noticing is an activity
which occurs in a framework of understandings which regulate what can and should
be noticed. Teachers’ questions are therefore important in helping students develop
the sophistication of their noticing and to become independent noticers of lived
experiences language and culture. The most basic level of operations that students can
perform on their experiences of language and culture is comparison in which students
identify similarities and differences. The process of comparison is multilayered: it
needs to allow space for comparisons between the learner’s background culture and
the target culture but also between what the learner already knows about the target
language and culture and the new input s/he is noticing. Comparison of similarities
and differences provide a resource for reflection and reflection as a classroom process
is a core element of developing interculturality (Kohonen, 2000). Reflection involves
several considerations. It is a process of interpretation of experience: this does not
mean however that the learner is being required to draw “the right conclusion” or
simply to explore his/her feelings about what has been discovered but rather that the
learner makes personal sense of experiences. This involves the learner in reflecting on
what one's experience of linguistic and cultural diversity means for oneself: how one
reacts to diversity, how one thinks about diversity, how one feels about diversity and
how one will find ways of engaging constructively with diversity. Finally,
interculturality is not a passive knowing of aspects of diversity but rather an active
engagement with diversity. This means that the intercultural learner needs to be
engaged in interacting on the basis his/her learning and experiences of diversity in
order to create personal meanings about one's experiences, to communicate those
meanings, to explore those meanings and to reshape them in response to others.
These processes do not in themselves ensure an intercultural pedagogy as they are
simply process not content. However, these activities themselves are important to
learning how to learn about language and culture. The processes are not linear in
relationship but rather all process may be co-present in any instance of teaching and
learning. Moreover, they do not represent a linear process of learning by which one
pass through each “stage” to reach a final outcome. They are rather a set of processes
through which the intercultural learner passes many times as s/he develops greater
complexity of understanding.

Aspects of classroom practice

The assumptions outlined in the previous section have strong implications for the
ways in which language teaching happens in practice. In particular, intercultural
language teaching and learning presupposes a movement from an emphasis on
explaining and interpreting another culture for students to one in which students
themselves develop an understanding of culture through a process of noticing,
reflecting on and interpreting aspects of culture presented through language. The role
of the teacher is therefore not to tell students about culture but to culturally rich
language experiences and to guide students learning through their questioning
practices. Such an approach is exemplified in the materials in examples 1-3.
ちゅうがく ねんせい
中 学 1年生
月 火 水 木 金
じげんめ
１時限目 り か こうみん こくご こくご じゅうどう
理科 公民 国語 国語 柔 道
えいご えいご しょしゃ すうがく り か
２時限目 英語 英語 書写 数学 理科
びじゅつ すうがく こうみん こくご にほんし
３時限目 美術 数学 公民 国語 日本史
こくご り か たいいく こうみん にほんし
４時限目 国語 理科 体育 公民 日本史
おんがく すうがく り か たいいく えいご
５時限目 音楽 数学 理科 体育 英語
すうがく えいご えいご すうがく
６時限目 数学 英語 ホームルーム 英語 数学
Example 1: School life in Japan
 Example 2: School life in Japan1

きゅうしょくこんだておもて
給 食 献 立 表
２月
や なっとう くだもの
月 ３ ごはん
焼きそば・ 納 豆 ・わかめスープ・ 果 物
だいず さけ しおや かぼちゃ じる くだもの
火 ４
大 豆 ごはん 鮭 の 塩 焼 き・ 南 瓜 サラダ・さつま 汁 ・ 果 物
かぼちゃ くだもの
水 ５ パン
チリコンカン・ 南 瓜 サラダ・ 果 物
むぎ にく なっとう くだもの
木 ６
麦 ごはん 肉 じゃが・ 納 豆 ・みそ汁・ 果 物
むぎ なっとう くだもの
金 ７
麦 ごはん おでん・ 納 豆 ・ 果 物
Example 3: School life in Japan

These three texts, drawn from a corpus texts used with a Japanese primary school
partial immersion program provide a resource for learning about culture in self-
directed ways. The texts are each authentic in the sense that each is an actual text
written by Japanese people, about Japanese realities for a Japanese audience. They
have been modified for use with language learners by adding furigana to assist with
reading and by adding pictures to the texts to assist comprehension. Example 1 is a
school timetable. Example 2 is a text written by Japanese students about their school.
Example 3 is a school canteen menu which was accompanied by pictures of the dishes
described. These texts are not substantially different from texts used in more
traditional programs. What is different is the questioning associated with the texts.
Such texts are typically used for reading comprehension and questions relate to
locating information from the texts: that is, the texts are treated as a language sample
and understanding is treated as decoding information encoded in the target language.
The change in approach with these texts begins by considering the texts as
encapsulations of culture expressed through language and rather than limiting
students’ experiences of the texts to information decoding, the pedagogical focus
moves students onto considering what each text represents about Japanese culture and
society.

This is done through a series of tasks developed around the issue of schooling
designed to encourage exploration of
Focus 1: My school cultural similarities and differences.
In groups of three, students discuss the Students began with Focus 1, in which
following questions: they were asked to reflect on their own
 What is your normal day at school? school situation. The questions
What do you do? When do you do provide opportunities to practice
it? language abilities such as descriptions,
 What is your school like? Describe present tense verbs and school
the buildings and the grounds. vocabulary with reference to a familiar
 Do you think your school and school context. The tasks in this focus are
day are like those of other schools in designed to involve students in
Australia? What might be similar discussion which provides for the
and what might be different? possibility of different perspectives
emerging from students. The
discussion was designed to be conducted in both Japanese and English with English
being drawn on to allow issues to emerge which were beyond the students’ language
proficiency. The intercultural aims of this task are to activate students’ own
knowledge and assumptions about schooling and to consider the variability which is
found within their own culture and society. The final question is particularly
important as it serves to underline that experiences of culture are only ever partial and
that variability is an inherent feature of all cultural contexts.

In Focus 2, the questions move from students’ current knowledge of schooling to an

experience, through language, of
Focus 2: Japanese Schools schooling in Japan. In the tasks in
In groups of 4 students read a text about this focus, groups of students are
Japanese schools and discuss the following given one of the selection texts
questions: used in the unit of work (such as
 What do you notice about this school? those in Examples 1-3 above).
 How is it similar to your school? Each text is treated as an instance
 How is it different from your school? of cultural information. The
 Do you think all Japanese schools are like questions are designed to
this? What might be similar and what encourage students to move
might be different? beyond comprehension and to
begin to notice cultural
similarities and differences and to make comparisons between their own cultural
assumptions and the new information they are being presented with. Students are
asked to construct their own understanding about Japanese schools from the text,
rather than being given the information directly by the teacher thereby opening up a
process of intercultural exploration. Students’ work on the basic questions needs to be
scaffolded through interactions with the teacher in which questions lead students to
notice elements presented through the text and to develop comparisons. The
intercultural focus of the task is noticing culture through text and developing
comparisons, both of which engage students in processes of reflection. Again the final
question makes the idea of cultural variability relevant with this task as a way of
emphasising that any experience of a culture is always a partial representation.

The partial nature of experiences of culture are emphasised in Focus 3 in which

students group the knowledge
Focus 3: Japanese schools gained from reading diverse texts
Students reassemble in groups of three so that and enlarge their representation of
each person has read a different text. Each the new culture. The students are
student presents his/her text to the others. again involved in a process of
Students discuss the questions from Task 2 social interaction in which
again: different elements of noticing and
 What do you notice about this school? comparison are grouped. The total
 How is it similar to your school? group of texts was designed so
 How is it different from your school? that some texts overlapped and
 Do you think all Japanese schools are like provided different information on
this? What might be similar and what the same event. Focus 3 develops
might be different? a more complex representation of
In addition, students consider the following the culture and involves a
question: synthesising of information in
 How has your view of Japanese schools which each text is recognised as a
changed after having looked at all the partial representation of culture
texts? from which a more complete
understanding can be developed.
It involves comparison not only with the background culture of the learner but also
requires comparison of previously known information and new information in order
to synthesise a representation. The development of more complex cultural
representations from multiple experiences of culture is foregrounded by the final
question which asks to students to reflect on their experience of assembling a cultural
representation and how they have moved from a more limited to a more complex view
of Japanese schools.

The final focus moves again back to the students’ perspective. They are invited to
reflect on their experience from a
Focus 4: Thinking about schools
personalised dimension, constructed
In groups, students discuss the following
here as likes and dislikes. The
questions:
power of this task lies in the
 What would you like about going to requirement to decentre from one’s
school in Japan? What wouldn’t you own cultural perspective. The first
like? question encourages students to
 What do you think a Japanese person reflect about their experience of
might like about your school? What do Japan from their own cultural
you think they wouldn’t like? starting points. The second question
requires the student to see his/her
own culture from the perspective of
another. The decentring here is developed from a personalised perspective which
allows these young learners to approach a conceptually difficult task. The questions
are designed to highlight multiple perspectives: the perspectives of different learners
with different preferences as well as the perspectives of different cultural expectations
and assumptions.

The four focuses provided in the discussion above are attempts to construct a pathway
by which students are encouraged to move from their own culture-internal views of
familiar experience of life towards an understanding of another way of constructing
the same experience. The stimulus for movement is not the delivery of new
information but rather a question led process of exploration which engages learners
directly through target language texts as cultural artefacts. The pathway is designed
not so much around the idea of acquiring knowledge but rather around developing the
capacities for intercultural exploration. The key features of the activities discussed
above are:

1. involving students in a process of noticing, comparing, reflecting and

interacting;
2. constructing the background culture of the learner and the target culture as
equally valid representations of human life;
3. viewing instances of language use as experiences of culture and opportunities
for culture learning;
4. focusing on the capabilities required for on-going learning about cultures
through experiences of language; and
5. encouraging the inclusion of multiple perspectives.

Concluding comments
The language teaching profession has consistently argued that languages education is
important for developing intercultural understanding. However, when language
teaching has focused only on learning the language code, students have few
opportunities to develop such understanding. Moreover, when cultural input is limited
to isolated snippets of information about the target language culture, this too provides
little opportunity for deep cultural learning. Intercultural approaches to language
teaching and learning take the development of cultural understanding and the ability
to use cultural knowledge to facilitate communication as primary goals for language
learning, along with the development of language competence and linguistic
awareness. In an intercultural approach, learners are encouraged to notice, compare
and reflect on language and culture, and to develop their own understanding of their
own culture as well as the culture of others. This paper has attempted to outline some
of the main principles that teachers use to develop an intercultural approach in their
classrooms to enhance their learners’ experiences of language and culture.

Notes
1
I wish to thank Kylie Farmer and her colleagues at Huntingdale Primary
School for their assistance with these texts.

References
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