Teaching Intercultural Competence Across the Age Range

From Theory to Practice

Manuela Wagner, Dorie Conlon Perugini, Michael Byram, Manuela Wagner, Dorie Conlon Perugini, Michael Byram

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098927
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This ground-breaking book is the first to describe in detail how teachers, supported by university educators and education advisers, might plan and implement innovative ideas based on sound theoretical foundations. Focusing on the teaching and learning of intercultural communicative competence in foreign language classrooms in the USA, the authors describe a collaborative project in which graduate students and teachers planned, implemented and reported on units which integrated intercultural competence in a systematic way in classrooms ranging from elementary to university level. The authors are clear and honest about what worked and what didn't, both in their classrooms and during the process of collaboration. This book will be required reading for both scholars and teachers interested in applying academic theory in the classroom, and in the teaching of intercultural competence.

1Houses Around the World

Patty Silvey and Silke Gräfnitz

Introduction

In this first chapter we will describe our journey to creating and implementing a unit on ‘The House’ in a 4th grade Spanish lesson in a Glastonbury, CT school. In Glastonbury schools there is an agreed curriculum, including the topics taught. Our project fitted into the overall curriculum and was a modification of an existing unit of study.

We are Patty and Silke

Patty is a graduate of Assumption College in Worcester, MA, and holds a master’s degree in educational technology from the University of Hartford, CT. Patty’s love of languages was first fostered in meeting her childhood neighbor and friend whose parents were from Belgium and spoke only French to their children. She started her ‘formal’ language education in a nursery school where she learned to sing, recite and count in French. Language learning in earnest restarted in junior high school and continued in high school where she was (finally!) able to add her second language, Spanish. She is a close colleague of Dorie Conlon Perugini, one of the editors of this book who has been introduced in the Introduction, and has been teaching in the Glastonbury Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) Department for the past 15 years. She was intrigued in what intercultural competence (IC) might look like at the elementary level and wanted to further explore this idea with both Manuela and Dorie.

Silke Gräfnitz is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut where she has also been teaching classes in German, German literature and human rights. Previously she studied literature, comparative studies and Japanese studies at the University of Tübingen, where she additionally interned and worked with the German as a Foreign Language Department. In addition to this she has been an intern and working student with Mercedes Benz’s International Training Program and International Quality Management, and worked with Bosch’s International Sales Department. Silke is passionate about foreign language acquisition and teaching, and how IC competence can positively affect us in our everyday lives. To her, fostering early IC is a key ingredient in raising a future generation of skilled leaders and conflict managers.

The existing unit in the Glastonbury syllabus

The Glastonbury syllabus provides a detailed approach to the content of the curriculum for Spanish lessons (see Table 1.1). It consists of statements about what students are expected to learn, ‘enduring understandings’, the use or application of the language learnt, ‘essential questions’, as well as the language content. With this as a starting point, and having discussed the theory and Byram’s model in the classroom, we thought:

Houses around the world. Sounds like an easy enough topic from which to glean evidence of intercultural competence from our students. Everyone has to live somewhere and in some sort of dwelling. Houses tell a story and that story can be very personal. Houses reflect the culture of anything from an entire country to a neighborhood community to an individual family. We have all traveled, and read, and know houses can look quite different from one part of town to another, or from one part of the world to another. We know, too, that some of those differences are most certainly based on regional climate and weather patterns as well as personal architectural preferences. These differences may also rely quite heavily on the finances of the people. Hmmm. How far were we willing to tread into this subject matter? After all, I am their Spanish teacher, not a teacher of social anthropology nor of consumer economics and financial planning. What did our students know about houses in other parts of our state or country, much less the world? Would they be able to adjust or suspend their attitudes with the new information presented?

Table 1.1Unit on ‘The House’
Unit title	The House
Unit description	As part of the year-long study of how we are connected to the Caribbean, students will complete the year with a unit that helps them discover and uncover the similarities and differences in various houses across the United States and the Caribbean. This unit spirals the study of ‘Structures’ from grade 3 as well as the unit of study of Puerto Rico earlier this year. It will give students the vocabulary to speak and write broadly about the structure called a house.
Enduring understandings	• Students will be able to describe various houses from the United States and the Caribbean. • Students will be able to describe the similarities and differences between houses from different cultures.
Essential questions	• How do I name and describe the outside of a house? • How do I name the rooms and describe the inside of a house? • How can I explain why I like a certain room? • What is a ‘patio’ and how might it be different in a Hispanic home and Hispanic world?
Content	• When prompted ‘What’s outside your house?’ in the target language, students would be able to produce a response using new vocabulary. • When prompted to ‘Describe (the outside of) your house’, students will be able to produce an oral or written response. • Students will demonstrate correct usage of the verbs estar, ser and tener with regard to describing a house. • Students will demonstrate correct usage of numbers in the hundreds with correct agreement. • Students will demonstrate correct usage of noun/adjective agreement.

Classroom context

The students we chose for this lesson are all in grade 4, roughly aged nine to ten. They attend a public elementary school and, for the most part, have had Spanish instruction since 1st grade. The school itself has approximately 435 students, kindergarten to grade 5. In a January 2014 report to the Glastonbury, CT Board of Education, 28 of these students were reported to come from a home where a language other than English was spoken, with 13 different languages represented. Additionally, 5.4% of this school was eligible for free or reduced lunch services at the time when this project was conducted. Table 1.2 summarizes the situation.

Table 1.2Summary of the classroom and students
Type of school (e.g. primary, middle, high school)	Grade level(s)	Average age of the students	Average number of students per class	Number of classes per week	Number of minutes per class	Number of previous years of language study
Primary	4th grade	9–10	21	3	25	3

Preparation

In the Glastonbury Spanish curriculum in 4th grade, the students ‘travel through the Caribbean’ via a year-long, overarching essential question: How are we connected to the Caribbean? It is felt that this question, along with the underlying unit essential questions, will, among other things and in the words of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (2013: 17), ‘make it more likely that the unit will be intellectually engaging, provide transparency for students, and encourage and model metacognition for students’.

The overarching essential question is revisited over the course of the year, weaving in and out of various other unit themes. It is expected that, on completion of this particular unit on The House, students will have discovered the similarities and differences among various houses across the United States and the Caribbean. The unit as it is written allows for the re-introduction or spiraling of vocabulary from prior grades as well as embedding new vocabulary and grammar structures, through the lens of understanding aspects of life in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

The spiraling of vocabulary is done throughout the students’ foreign language education in grades 1–12 and is based on Jerome Bruner’s (1960: 33) theory that ‘any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’. Bruner highlights three key features of the spiraled curriculum:

•The student revisits a topic, theme or subject several times throughout their school career.

•The complexity of the topic or theme increases with each revisit.

•New learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context with the old information.

The unit in question re-introduces elements of a connected unit from grade 3 where students learn about various types of structures, both man-made and natural, albeit in a much broader sense than just housing. Grade 3 thus includes the vocabulary for such man-made edifices as market, church, airport and school as well as lake, beach, mountain and rainforest which represent the natural structures.

Since there were different unit themes from which we could have chosen in the grade 4 curriculum, how did we come to decide on this o...