Developing Intercultural Language Learning 9783030591120, 9783030591137

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
Changing and Challenges Times in Education
Reconceptualising Language Teaching
What Is Intercultural Language Learning?
What Do We Know and Still Need to Know?
About This Book
References
2 Why a Developmental Perspective Matters for Intercultural Language Learning
A Paradigm Shift in Second Language Learning
Reframing the Goals of Language/s Education
An Intercultural and Multilingual Orientation
Curriculum Design
Pedagogical Stance
Multilingual and Intercultural
Persons and Personalisation
Knowledge and Knowing
Mediation and Meaning Making
Transformation Through Reflection
Understandings of Development
SLA and Second Language Development
The Bioecological Model of Human Development
Experiential Learning
Development Within an Intercultural Language Teaching Orientation
Conclusion
References
3 Designing Programs for Developing Intercultural Language Learning
The Educational Context
Design of the Case Study
Knowing the Learners
Why Knowing Learners Matters
Finding Out About Learners
Using Profiling Information to Inform Practice
Designing the Teaching and Learning Program
Aims, Goals and Objectives
Intermediate Indonesian
Program Context and Learners
Program Purpose and Broad Goals
Scoping the Program
Concepts
Language
Experiences
Sequencing the Program
Concepts
Language
Experiences
Conclusion
References
4 Enacting and Mediating the Development of Intercultural Language Learning
Dimensions of Enactment
Pedagogical Stance
Mediating Through Instruction and Interactive Talk
Mediating Through Texts and Resources
Conclusion
References
5 Assessing and Evidencing the Development of Intercultural Language Learning
Issues and Considerations in Assessing Intercultural Language Learning
Designing Assessment for Intercultural Language Learning
Evidencing development of intercultural language learning
Example 1: Justin
Example 2: Emma
Example 3: Jim
Conclusion
References
6 Insights and Conclusion
Insights About Developing Intercultural Language Learning
Implications for Developing Intercultural Language Learning
The Future
References
References
Index

Citation preview

Developing Intercultural Language Learning Michelle Kohler

Developing Intercultural Language Learning “Drawing thoughtfully on an elaborated understanding of languages learning within an intercultural orientation and a commitment to praxis, in this book Michelle Kohler addresses the compelling question of how to engender the development of learners as language learners, language users and as persons capable of interpreting, creating and exchanging meanings across languages and cultures. With her voice both as researcher and teacher she considers, in a fundamental and authentic way, the role of teachers in promoting such learning. Through her account of a sustained self-study, she traces insightfully the processes of planning and designing, enacting and mediating, and assessing and evidencing students’ language learning, foregrounding concepts, experiences and reflective processes in designing learning, and students’ interpretations, reactions and reflections, in time and over time, in response. She explains and illustrates amply her own theorising and practice in a way that exemplifies the intellectually rich and ethical, ecological stance towards languages learning and development that she is advocating.” —Angela Scarino, Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and Director of the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures, University of South Australia

Michelle Kohler

Developing Intercultural Language Learning

Michelle Kohler UniSA Justice and Society University of South Australia ADELAIDE, South Australia, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-59112-0 ISBN 978-3-030-59113-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Figures created by Ari Bickley For my boys

Contents

1

Introduction Changing and Challenges Times in Education Reconceptualising Language Teaching What Is Intercultural Language Learning? What Do We Know and Still Need to Know? About This Book References

2

Why a Developmental Perspective Matters for Intercultural Language Learning A Paradigm Shift in Second Language Learning Reframing the Goals of Language/s Education An Intercultural and Multilingual Orientation Curriculum Design Pedagogical Stance Understandings of Development SLA and Second Language Development The Bioecological Model of Human Development Experiential Learning Development Within an Intercultural Language Teaching Orientation Conclusion References

1 2 3 5 6 8 9

13 14 17 18 19 22 33 33 35 37 40 45 46 vii

viii

3

4

5

CONTENTS

Designing Programs for Developing Intercultural Language Learning The Educational Context Design of the Case Study Knowing the Learners Why Knowing Learners Matters Finding Out About Learners Using Profiling Information to Inform Practice Designing the Teaching and Learning Program Aims, Goals and Objectives Intermediate Indonesian Scoping the Program Sequencing the Program Conclusion References

53 54 55 58 58 59 60 62 63 65 67 77 86 87

Enacting and Mediating the Development of Intercultural Language Learning Dimensions of Enactment Pedagogical Stance Mediating Through Instruction and Interactive Talk Mediating Through Texts and Resources Conclusion References

89 90 90 92 94 98 99

Assessing and Evidencing the Development of Intercultural Language Learning Issues and Considerations in Assessing Intercultural Language Learning Designing Assessment for Intercultural Language Learning Evidencing development of intercultural language learning Example 1: Justin Example 2: Emma Example 3: Jim Conclusion References

101 102 104 112 112 117 122 129 129

CONTENTS

6

Insights and Conclusion Insights About Developing Intercultural Language Learning Implications for Developing Intercultural Language Learning The Future References

ix

131 132 135 137 137

References

139

Index

149

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

3.3 5.1 5.2 5.3

Fig. 6.1

Student profile questionnaire Considerations in designing programs for intercultural language learning Interrelated layers of programming over time The translating/mediating and think aloud assessment The excursion recount assessment The bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection assessment Characteristics for complexifying intercultural language learning

61 72 79 107 109 111 133

xi

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2

The set of strands and sub-strands of the Australian Curriculum: Languages The teaching and learning program—Intermediate Indonesian Overview of experiences and learning demands

21 68 83

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The introductory chapter establishes the rationale and focus of the book against the backdrop of a dramatically changing global context. It also situates the book in relation to emergent issues and understandings in the field of languages education, particularly the reconceptualisation of the goals and an intercultural orientation towards language teaching and learning. The chapter presents the central argument that a developmental view is crucial for interculturally oriented language teaching and learning as it is through a sustained engagement with substantive content and experiences, and reflection on these, that language learning becomes transformative for learners. The introduction outlines the key question that guides this book of how the work of language teachers might enable learners to develop their own intercultural outlook such that it becomes part of who they are, how they see the world and how they interact with diverse others in their lives. Keywords Rationale · Globalisation · Intercultural orientation

This book springs from the questions about language learning that have recurred for me since my early teaching career. In those early years I found myself asking what my students were learning, and how my teaching could most effectively promote their learning. Over time, my concerns

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_1

1

2

M. KOHLER

for learning have been broadened to an interest in learners’ development as people. These questions are situated within what I consider to be a humanistic view of education; one that perceives the contribution and value of education as leading to the betterment of society and of particular interest to me, how we can learn to live and flourish together in diversity. In my pursuit of answers to my questions or at least ways forward over many years, I have been drawn towards an intercultural orientation as a means of considering the relational and transformational power of communicating and engaging with others, across diverse languages and cultures. The key question that this book attempts to address is how language teachers might enable learners to develop their own intercultural outlook such that it becomes part of who they are, how they see the world and how they interact with diverse others in their lives. In writing this book, I am assuming that teachers of languages share similar questions and concerns, and will appreciate the attempt to articulate how one might grapple with the notion of development within an intercultural orientation in language teaching. In doing so, I hope this expands our understandings and enables us to attend to learners’ development with greater insight and self-awareness.

Changing and Challenges Times in Education The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been tumultuous with global shifts in geopolitics and economic power, unprecedented mobility of people, ideas and artifacts, technological development and mass communication practices, within the context of climate change and most recently a global pandemic. These shifts are not novel but what is striking is the intensity, speed and scale of these changes, creating more extensive and intensive pressures and challenges on people and communities. The fluidity, mobility and multi-dimensional nature of communities, and of their peoples, knowledges, communication practices, and technologies, are reflected in notions such as ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert, 2013). Changing and challenging times require adaptation and response, and education will be crucial in considering what current and future societies need in order to meet these challenges. The recently released OECD 2030 goals for education (OECD, 2019) represent an attempt to outline how a future citizenry might be prepared for times that are likely to be

1

INTRODUCTION

3

more volatile, dynamic, and uncertain. The goals outline a set of knowledge, skills, understandings and dispositions intended to enable young people to not only survive but to flourish in the future. Similar policy and curricula initiatives in education settings around the world recognize that education in this century will need to respond to, and embrace diversity, indeed diversities, as both a characteristic of students, and also as constitutive of learning itself. These ideas are typically referred to in terms such as internationalization, international mindedness, global citizenship, intercultural understandings and values based education. A central concern in these notions is how to enable young people to participate effectively in increasingly diverse communities, particularly through developing attributes such as empathy, solidarity, and appreciation of otherness. Being able to deftly navigate diversity with sophisticated communication repertoires is likely to be a decisive feature in whether individuals and communities can learn to live together and continue to grow in their knowledge and understandings. Developing multilingual capabilities will be integral to not only communicative deftness but also to the kind of mutual insights and attunement to otherness required to genuine bring about greater respect, social cohesion and equality. This requires both a multilingual and an intercultural orientation in education and in languages education. Within languages education, an intercultural orientation assumes diversity as it starting point, as it views teaching and learning as acts of meaning creation and exchange that are fundamentally linguistically and culturally situated. Language teaching therefore has the potential to make a significant and distinctive contribution to goals furthering how we learn to live together in diversity. Claims such as the value of language learning for enhancing social cohesion and mutual respect have often been made yet seldom realized with evidence of how such learning is actually achieved. In addition, understandings of what it means to teach and learn a language, have undergone substantial shifts in recent decades, and there is a need to reconsider the goals of language teaching and learning for contemporary times, and what this means for understanding how such learning develops.

Reconceptualising Language Teaching Accompanying the global changes outlined earlier, have also been changes in theories of how language(s) are learned and used. For the latter part

4

M. KOHLER

of the previous century, second language learning theories were dominated by cognitivism that focussed on information processing models of language learning that were understood as taking place within the minds of individuals (Atkinson, 2011). In more recent decades, the field has expanded substantially in response to insights from emergentist approaches (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006), and the social turn (Block, 2003) that has drawn on psychology based theories of human consciousness in developing a sociocultural theory of learning that foregrounds language learning as a social achievement (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). In addition, there has been increased recognition of the role of culture in language socialization, use and learning (Byram & Feng, 2004; Kramsch, 1993) as well as insights from studies of multilingualism that show complex capabilities or a kind of ‘multicompetence’ (Cook, 1992) that differs significantly from the language learning of monolinguals. These seismic shifts have challenged the long-standing reference point for language learning of the ‘native speaker’, and have led to a review of the goals for language/s learning that are more aligned to bilingual and multilingual learners. Most recently attempts have been made to bring together contemporary understandings in order to conceptualise a holistic framework for second language teaching and learning (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016) and a reorientation of the goals of language learning (Leung & Scarino, 2016) towards a functional multilingual as the norm. Concurrently there have been major shifts in understandings of the foundational concepts of language and culture that underpin theories of language learning and use. In relation to language, understandings have essentially expanded from a view of language as code to language as a dynamic social semiotic, a shared and embodied resource for making meaning (Halliday, 1978; Shohamy, 2006). In a similar vein, understandings of culture have changed from ‘high culture’ associated with reified artifacts and knowledge, to culture as everyday practices and ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, 1973) that are shared by groups, to the discursive practices, meanings and interpretive frames associated with particular communities (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Risager, 2011). Furthermore, culture is no longer considered as peripheral in conceptualisations of language learning but is positioned as core to it (Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein, & Colby, 2003), inseparable (in the main) from language (Risager, 2006).

1

INTRODUCTION

5

When language and culture are considered as interrelated symbolic systems, they both come into play in the learning of a language, and in the learning of a language and culture in addition to one’s own, there is necessarily an interface between both ‘sets’ of languages and cultures. Learning an additional language involves learning how to navigate the whole linguistic and cultural resource available to an individual. Language learning becomes a process of drawing on and choosing from semiotic resources, those already known to the learner and those that are in the process of becoming known, to meet the communicative demands of a given context. This process is not just an exchange of words but an exchange of symbols that are historically and ideologically situated, and embodied. Thus learning an additional language and communicating with others across linguistic and cultural worlds necessitates the ability to read situatedness, that is ‘symbolic competence’ (Kramsch, 2006). It is these understandings about the process of learning to move between familiar and new linguistic and cultural worlds that underpin interest in and the development of theories and practices of inter-cultural language learning.

What Is Intercultural Language Learning? Intercultural language learning is an orientation to language learning that has at its core, an integrative view of the foundational concepts of language, culture and learning that come together in a pedagogical stance that aims to transform language learners through their language learning experiences (Byram & Wagner, 2018; Kramsch, 2012; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). This orientation has as its starting point the diversity of learners, teachers, contexts and languages, recognizing that this process of learner development is situated historcally and temporally. It is fundamentally concerned with learning; of the student, and also of the teacher and wider community. Within an intercultural orientation, teaching and learning are understood as both cognitive and social acts, occurring on both intrapersonal and interpersonal planes. Learners are not viewed solely as performers of language but rather they are participants in it, and this requires them to develop awareness of the nature of language, culture and communication. They have multiple roles, as performers, as analysers, and as themselves (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). That is, through their language learning students are learning to know, understand and ‘be’ in new ways, linguistically and culturally speaking. They are learning to understand the nature

6

M. KOHLER

of interacting with diverse others across languages and cultures and how effective communication requires a mutual exchange and interpretation of meaning. This process does not just occur automatically but rather learners need to participate in intercultural encounters and engage in reflection on these in order to develop the meta-understandings about interculturality, and their language learning and identity development.

What Do We Know and Still Need to Know? Over several decades, work related to interculturally oriented language teaching and learning has focused on conceptualising the orientation and identifying implications for practice (Byram & Zarate, 1994; Kramsch, 2011; Lo Bianco, Crozet, & Liddicoat, 1999; Risager, 2007), as well as developing guidelines and frameworks to support aspects of teaching practice (Byram, Gribkova, & Starkey, 2002; Byram, Holmes, & Savvides, 2013; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Liddicoat, Scarino, Papademetre, & Kohler, 2003). More recent work has focused on enactment dimensions, exploring language teachers’ pedagogical stance and mediation practices (Kohler, 2015) and their role as semiotic workers in classroom interaction (Kearney, 2016). There has also been growing interest in the political and ethical dimensions of interculturally oriented languages teaching that has led to the notion of intercultural citizenship education (Byram, 2008, 2012; Guilherme, 2002; Houghton, 2013; Levine & Phipps, 2012; Porto, Houghton, & Byram, 2017). Much of this work has focused on establishing a rationale for this framing, however there is a growing body of practice-oriented studies. This work has been largely collaborative in nature, researchers working with language teachers to develop programs of study based on citizenship oriented projects that require students to engage in ‘action in the community’ including through study abroad, community projects and materials evaluation (Byram, Golubeva, Han, & Wagner, 2017). These projects have been largely short-term or oneoff experiences that tend to focus on processes of collaboration, and the immediate impact on learners such as raising their awareness of inequality. In a recent study, following up on a project conducted across multiple countries, Porto (2019) investigated the long-term impact of the project on a group of Argentinian students. She found that the students typically recalled their emotional engagement with the content and their peers in the partner country, and they had developed some awareness and personal

1

INTRODUCTION

7

insights, but were in the ‘pre-political’ level (Byram, 2008, 2014) in terms of taking civic action. Porto’s study highlights the need to consider the long-term impact of programs and experiences, and the importance of developing sustained and normalized, rather than episodic, approaches to teaching within an intercultural orientation. The cumulative impact of work to date is that sound theoretical foundations and valuable insights into practice, particularly the work of language teachers, have been yielded (Kohler, 2020). There is less insight into how intercultural language learning itself develops and what the relationship may be between what teachers do in their planning, teaching and assessing that may lead to such learning. Previous studies have been principally episodic and short –term in nature, focusing on a semester or unit program or an individual instance such as a project or task. Undoubtedly an individual episode or task is important, however it can only provide insights about learning that are highly specific to a particular moment and conditions, and it cannot indicate how learning has developed or what has been learned over time in relation to a particular program of study. There is yet to be investigation of intercultural language learning that takes a developmental view and considers an accumulation of episodes, and the interaction between them. It is the accumulation and connecting of experiences, across contexts and time that form the basis of personal transformation through learning (Shulman, 1986). In order for learners to undergo such a transformation, as intercultural language learners and participants, they need to develop a repertoire of how to interpret, learn and navigate diverse languages and cultures. In order for such learning to develop, teachers must understand, and develop ways of attending to this kind of dynamic and discursive oriented learning in their curriculum, pedagogical and assessment practices (Moore, 2012; Nagel & Scholes, 2016). Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) have provided a comprehensive outline of these aspects and have argued the need for both short and long-term perspectives in designing programs and assessment for intercultural language learning. It is this developmental view, with an interest in how teaching, learning and assessing programs may cater for it that is the central interest of this book. Any consideration of learning, be it episodic or developmental, requires attention to assessment. The area of assessment has been the subject of much discussion in the area of intercultural communication, largely in tertiary education contexts (Deardorff, 2011, 2015; Dervin, 2010;

8

M. KOHLER

Houghton, 2013; Sercu, 2004), and to some degree within intercultural language teaching in schooling (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Scarino, 2009, 2010). This work has foregrounded the need to attend to the developmental nature of such learning, and the meta-understandings and identity dimensions of it, something that is not currently captured in traditional approaches to assessment and which requires a more learningoriented approach. Using assessment in ways that are principally oriented towards furthering learning, that is assessment for learning (Lantolf & Poehner, 2010; Purpura, 2016), foregrounds the relationship between learning episodes over time and aligns well with the nature of intercultural language learning, as a ‘long-term process of cumulative experiences and reflection’ (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013, p. 132). In adopting a developmental perspective on intercultural language learning it is necessary to explore teachers’ assumptions and expectations in relation to development in learning that are embedded in their practices and that lay the foundation for any such learning. Teachers’ planning and programming processes, classroom teaching, and their assessment understandings and practices, need to be understood as a basis for considering development of intercultural language learning. It is not that this book assumes a direct causal relationship between teachers’ work and student learning, but rather that it acknowledges the importance of language teachers’ conceptual understandings of development in setting the parameters for learning and their roles as ‘quintessential go-betweens’ (Kramsch, 2004) in mediating what transpires as learning in the classroom (Kohler, 2015).

About This Book This book explores why a developmental perspective matters for intercultural language teaching and learning, and shows through a sustained case study, in which the author is both teacher and researcher, how teachers of languages working within an intercultural orientation might attend to development in their own practice. The book is organized through key aspects of teachers’ work as they aim to develop intercultural language learning in practice. Chapter 2 examines both a rationale for, and the conceptual framing that underpins a developmental perspective in language teaching, within an intercultural orientation. Following this are three chapters that trace the processes

1

INTRODUCTION

9

comprising the case study; curriculum design, planning and programming; enacting and mediating; and assessing and evidencing intercultural language learning. Chapter 3 explores curriculum design including guiding principles and conceptual framings for developing a teaching and learning program. Chapter 4 examines how intentions for teaching and learning are enacted and mediated in the classroom, with a focus on mediation practices, interactions and materials. Chapter 5 is presented in two parts, the first of which outlines a developmental perspective in assessing intercultural language learning, and the second of which considers the assessment experience and how intercultural language learning may be evidenced and understood from a developmental perspective. Bringing together the aspects of the case study, Chapter 6 considers the overall themes and their implications for those interested in an intercultural and developmental orientation in language teaching. This book is fundamentally concerned with praxis and the interface between theoretical understandings, and teachers’ and learners’ lived experiences. The book outlines one case in detail as a means of revealing the complex processes and considerations at work in developing intercultural language learning in practice. The understandings revealed by this case also raise implications for language teachers as they consider their own roles and practices in enabling students to develop their intercultural language learning and reflective understanding.

References Atkinson, D. (Ed.). (2011). Alternative approaches to second language acqusition. Abingdon: Routledge. Block, D. (2003). The social turn in second language acquisition. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013). Citizenship, language, and superdiversity: Towards complexity. Language, Identity and Education, 12(3), 193–196. https://doi. org/10.1080/15348458.2013.797276. Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflections. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (2012). Conceptualizing intercultural (communicative) competence and intercultural citizenship. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 85–97). Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Byram, M. (2014). Twenty-five years on—From cultural studies to intercultural citizenship. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 (3), 209–225.

10

M. KOHLER

Byram, M., & Feng, A. (2004). Culture and language learning: Teaching, research and scholarship. Language Teaching, 37 (3), 149–168. Byram, M., Golubeva, I., Han, H., & Wagner, M. (2017). From principles to practice in education for intercultural citizenship. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the intercultural dimension in language teaching: A practical introduction for teachers. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Byram, M., Holmes, P., & Savvides, N. (2013). Intercultural communicative competence in foreign language education: Questions of theory, practice and research. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 251–253. Byram, M., & Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 140– 151. Byram, M., & Zarate, G. (1994). Definitions, objectives and assessment of sociocultural competence. France: Retrieved from Strasbourg. Cook, V. J. (1992). Evidence for multicompetence. Language Learning Journal, 42, 557–591. Deardorff, D. (2011, Spring). Assessing intercultural competence. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.381. Deardorff, D. (2015). Intercultural competence: Mapping the future research agenda. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 3–5. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2015.03.002. Dervin, F. (2010). Assessing intercultural competence in language learning and teaching: A critical review of current efforts in higher education. In F. Dervin & E. Suolema-Salmi (Eds.), New approaches to assessing language and (inter)cultural competences in higher education (pp. 157–174). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Ellis, N. C., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). Language emergence: Implications for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 27, 558–589. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Guilherme, M. (2002). Critical citizens for an intercultural world: Foreign language education as cultural politics. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Houghton, S. A. (2013). Making intercultural communicative competence and identity-development visible for assessment purposes in foreign language education. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 311–325. Kearney, E. (2016). Intercultural learning in modern language education: Expanding meaning-making potentials. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kohler, M. (2015). Teachers as mediators in the foreign language classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

1

INTRODUCTION

11

Kohler, M. (2020). Intercultural language teaching and learning in classroom practice. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 413–426). New York: Routledge. Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2004). The language teacher as go-between. Utbildning & Demokrati, 13(3), 37–60. Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Kramsch, C. (2012). Theorizing translingual/transcultural competence. In G. S. Levin & A. Phipps (Eds.), Critical and intercultural theory and language pedagogy (pp. 15–31). Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning. Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. E. (2010). Dynamic assessment in the classroom: Vygotskian praxis for second language development. Language Teaching Research, 15(1), 11–33. Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. New York: Oxford University Press. Leung, C., & Scarino, A. (2016). Reonceptualizing the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 81–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12300-00267902/16/81-95. Levine, G. S., & Phipps, A. (2012). Critical and intercultural theory and language pedagogy. Boston: Heinle, Cengage Learning. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Liddicoat, A. J., Scarino, A., Papademetre, L., & Kohler, M. (2003). Report on intercultural language learning. Retrieved from Canberra. http://www1.cur riculum.edu.au/nalsas/pdf/intercultural.pdf. Lo Bianco, J., Crozet, C., & Liddicoat, A. J. (1999). Intercultural competence: From language policy to language education. In J. Lo Bianco, C. Crozet, & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), Striving for the third place: Intercultural competence through language education (pp. 1–22). Melbourne: Language Australia. Moore, K. (2012). Effective instructional strategies: From theory to practice (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nagel, M., & Scholes, L. (2016). Understanding development & learning: Implications for teaching. South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press. OECD. (2019). Transformative competencies, the organisation for economic co-operation and development learning compass 2030 concept notes. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teachingand-learning/learning/all-concept-notes/.

12

M. KOHLER

Paige, R. M., Jorstad, H., Siaya, L., Klein, F., & Colby, J. (Eds.). (2003). Culture learning in language education: A review of the literature. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Porto, M. (2019). Long-term impact of four intercultural citizenship projects in the higher education foreign language classroom. The Language Learning Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2019.1656279. Porto, M., Houghton, S., & Byram, M. (2017). Intercultural citizenship in the (foreign) language classroom. Language Teaching Research (Special Issue), 22, 1–15. Purpura, J. (2016). Second and foreign language assessment. Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 190–208. Risager, K. (2006). Language and culture: Global flows and local complexity: Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2007). Language and culture pedagogy: From a national to a transnational paradigm. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2011). Research Timeline: The cultural dimensions of language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 44(4), 485–499. Scarino, A. (2009). Assessing intercultural capability in language learning: Some issues. Language Teaching, 42(1), 67–80. Scarino, A. (2010). Assessing intercultural capability in learning languages: A renewed understanding of language, culture, learning and the nature of assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94(2), 324. Sercu, L. (2004). Assessing intercultural competence: A framework for systematic test development in foreign language education and beyond. Intercultural Education, 15(1), 73–89. Shohamy, E. (2006). Expanding language. In Language policy. Hidden agendas and new approaches (pp. 5–21). London and New York: Routledge. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301.

CHAPTER 2

Why a Developmental Perspective Matters for Intercultural Language Learning

Abstract This chapter presents the theoretical case for adopting a developmental perspective on intercultural language teaching and learning and lays the conceptual foundation for the remainder of the book. The discussion is presented in two sections. The first section briefly traces recent paradigm shifts in second language learning, and the reframing of the goals of languages education. An intercultural and multilingual orientation is considered in relation to how it may be realised through curriculum design and the language teacher’s pedagogical stance. The second section examines contemporary understandings of development, in particular a bioecological view of human development and its value in considering development of intercultural language learning. Keywords Curriculum · Intercultural language teaching · Human development

In this chapter, I briefly trace the emergence of an intercultural orientation in languages teaching as a backdrop to considering where the field is at and how the thinking and practice outlined in this book are situated. I consider contemporary understandings of this orientation including the underlying concepts of language and culture, and some of the key characteristics of an intercultural orientation that are crucial to enacting it in teaching and learning. I then turn to the notion of development and © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_2

13

14

M. KOHLER

discuss why this is important for language learning within an intercultural orientation. The field of second language acquisition has focused extensively on theorizing how languages are learned, particularly in terms of the influence of variables such as age and motivation (Dornyei, 2001; Ortega, 2009) and some recent work has called for a shift towards ‘second language development’ as a more helpful framing (Larsen-Freeman, 2015). Models of intercultural competence have focused in the main on cultural sensitivity with little attention to language, and with development framed as a series of levels or stages through which a learner moves in developing increasing sensitivity towards others (J. M. Bennett, Bennett, & Allen, 2003; M. J. Bennett, 1993). There has been little attention to examining the work of language teachers as the primary facilitators of development in interculturally oriented language programs in classroom contexts. This chapter will draw on theories of learning and human development according to sociocultural learning theory (Vygotsky, 1978a) and ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), to consider the nature of development and how it may be understood within the context of teachers’ work in developing intercultural language learning.

A Paradigm Shift in Second Language Learning The core concern of the field of second language acquisition (SLA) is to understand the nature and processes by which humans come to learn and use a language that is not their primary language of socialisation. It is important to briefly trace the history to show how theories of language learning have evolved, and to understand contemporary views and their implications for language teaching and learning within a developmental perspective. For much of the late twentieth century through the emergence of SLA as a field, the prevailing theory of how languages are learned was that it was primarily a cognitive, psychological process that occurred in the brain. Attempts to articulate this nature of language learning focused on the mind as a processor and drew on computing metaphors, highlighting aspects such as input and output, data and information processing, short and long-term memory storage, and retrieval. Cognitive theories considered language as an abstracted form that could be acquired through attention and memory of individuals who are genetically predisposed to it. Variation in rate or nature of acquisition was attributed to a range

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

15

of influences such as age, motivation, and interference from one’s first language. Still within a psychological tradition, later work began to consider the relationship between language learning and language use. The theory of emergentism proposed that knowing a language and acquiring its grammar was not innate or pre-programmed but was related to an individual’s opportunity to interact and use it. As such, cognition could be understood as dynamic and responsive to how an individual uses language in the external environment, within their societies and cultures (Ellis, 2007). There was also increasing recognition within SLA that second language learning is a social process, based on participation in language use and meaning-making practices with others. Informed by the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to develop a theory of human consciousness, sociocultural learning theory posited that knowledge is developed through socialisation between novices and more knowledgable others (Vygotsky, 1978a). Furthermore, these social processes of knowledge construction were recognised as situated in a particular context, of both the situation and the wider culture (Halliday, 1999). In this way, knowledge began to be understood as bound by social conventions, roles and actions shared within particular collectives, and that knowledge is subject to change. Knowledge does not exist apart from those who create, use, and mediate it as all knowledge is mediated as it develops through the interaction between individuals and moves from the interpersonal or interpsychological plane to the intrapersonal/intrapsychological plane as it becomes part of the learner’s knowledge. In order for knowledge to develop, there must be action of some kind that requires mediation, and one of the most crucial forms of action is using language. Further, one of the most powerful mediating ‘tools’ is language because, as Swain explains, ‘verbalisation changes thought, leading to development and learning’ (Swain, 2006, p. 110). A sociocultural perspective on language learning therefore, places a premium on language, language use, and inter-action. It views knowledge construction as socially mediated, contingent and relational; created through social and collective action, in particular contexts that are endowed with historical and cultural meanings. The gap between what a learner already knows and can do independently (in a self-regulated mode) and what a learner can do with the assistance of another (in other-regulated mode) is where development lies, and in order for development to occur, there must be mediation.

16

M. KOHLER

The primary medium through which mediation takes place is language; understood as a system of semiotic symbols, hence it is language, in all its manifestations, that is at a premium in considering how learning develops. The role that language, particularly first language, plays in the learning of a second language is not limited to it being a mediating device. Multilinguals not only draw on their first language to understand the second language, but that they have distinctive, multicompetences that mean they have heightened awareness of language (Cook, 1992; Cook & Li Wei, 2016a) and can construct meaning in innovative ways through processes such as codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011) and translanguaging (Garcia & Li Wei, 2015). Multilinguals activate their entire linguistic resource, navigating their meaning-making repertoires in order to communicate with others. Furthermore, in the act of communication, multilinguals are not only exchanging words and meanings but they are also exchanging themselves. That is, language learning is understood as an embodied process that involves the ‘fleshand-blood individuals who are doing the learning’ (Kramsch, 2009) with their existing subject positions and subjectivities, and those that become available to them through learning additional languages. In becoming multilingual and learning to communicate across languages and cultures, therefore, learners draw on all of their semiotic resources and their symbolic power to interpret and construct meaning with others. In each utterance and exchange, learners are learning to ‘read’ the other, to notice their physicality, status, memberships, affiliations as revealed through their language use. The act of communicating involves both parties in interpreting the meanings of the other person, in relation to the identity being projected by them, and at the same time, ascribing an identity to them; it is a reciprocal process of interpretation and identity exchange (Kramsch, 2011; Scarino, 2014). In interaction, we are simultaneously receiving identity as it is being performed, and projecting our identity as we understand and desire it to be received. Identity is thus not solely an individual accomplishment but it is socially constructed through a negotiation between individuals and others in a particular time, place and cultural context. This notion means that learners are not just acquiring a new language, as a neutral body of knowledge, but that they are acquiring a new identity as a bilingual or multilingual person. As learners acquire a new range of symbolic resources they enter into new possibilities for making meaning and new ways of being; they are being transformed. This transformation enables learners

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

17

to enter into new spaces and become members, to varying degrees, of communities of users of the language, both real and imagined (Anderson, 1991). Having acquired a particular language does not however guarantee passage into the community of users of that language as identity is both performed by self and attributed by others, and membership will involve negotiation and in some cases may never be fully given despite the individual’s desire to be included. There is an issue for language learners therefore related to the degree of investment required in learning the language, and the desire for affiliation with the language (Norton, 2000). A learner’s willingness to invest in acquiring a language and the associated desire to participate in the language-speaking community is a major influence on language learning and identity development (Norton, 2013). The major advances that have occurred over the last half-century have been so profound that it has led to a multidisciplinary effort to bring cognitive and social theories together into a holistic theoretical framework for second language acquisition. The transdisciplinary conceptual framework developed by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) is comprised of multiple dimensions or facets that are in a nested relationship, from micro/cognitive to meso/social and macro/ideological layers. The framework, despite the limitations of any conceptual framework, offers a rich encapsulation of contemporary understandings of second language learning, and highlights the complexity of it, and of attempts to foster its development.

Reframing the Goals of Language/s Education The development of a framework that captures contemporary theories of language learning has been a significant step in the process of theorising the teaching and learning of additional languages. A further step is needed in order to move the theoretical understandings into practice, and this involves a reconsideration of the goals of languages education. For more than four decades, the prevailing paradigm of languages education has been communicative language teaching (CLT). Underpinned by the notion of communicative competence (Hymes, 1972), CLT aimed to prepare learners to become native-like speakers of the target language, able to participate as members of the target language community. The central goal was to achieve native-speaker proficiency with as little influence from one’s first language as possible. Furthermore, communication itself, while initially conceived as negotiated meaning,

18

M. KOHLER

in practice become strongly transactional in nature, with language being seen as a resource to ‘get things done’ as activities and tasks are carried out in the ‘real-world’. In practice, this led to an emphasis on instrumental language use (Leung & Scarino, 2016), often from the perspective of an outsider/foreigner, and disassociated from the communicators themselves. Looking back, CLT was primarily a monolingual affair: aiming to foreground the use of a single language to the exclusion of any other. Given more recent understandings and notions such as multicompetence (Cook, 1992; Cook & Li Wei, 2016b), a monolingual native speaker norm is not sufficient as a goal for those learning additional languages. Instead the goals of languages education need to take into account the distinctive processes involved in acquiring and using multiple languages, as well as the transformative and symbolic nature of exchanging meanings and ‘selves’ with others. Expanded goals need to acknowledge the diversity of learners and all that they bring to their language learning endeavour; their language/s and culture/s, experiences, aspirations, needs and desires in relation to the language/s being learned. In addition, the goals of language teaching and learning need to reflect contemporary understandings of communication as much more than transacting but as a process of interlinguistic and intercultural exchange in which meanings and identities are in flux and continuously negotiated by participants (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008). Moreover, language learners come to understand that communication within and across languages and cultures is fundamentally an interpretive act that involves learning how to mediate meaning and as a result, recognising the mediating role of language and culture. Taken together, these considerations warrant a renewed set of goals that address the diversity of learners, of languages and cultures, and aspire to a bilingual or multilingual norm. It requires a fundamentally educative orientation focussed on personal and interpersonal development, and geared towards critical intercultural engagement (Kramsch, 2014; Leung & Scarino, 2016; McNamara, 2019).

An Intercultural and Multilingual Orientation In the latter part of the twentieth century, the growing recognition of the role that culture plays in developing communicative competence led to the emergence of intercultural communicative competence (Byram,

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

19

1995). The move to recognize culture as more than additional but as ‘the core’ (Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein, & Colby, 2003) of second language learning resulted in various attempts to conceptualise models and frameworks to guide language teaching (Byram, Golubeva, Han, & Wagner, 2017; Byram, Nichols, & Stephens, 2001; Crozet & Liddicoat, 2000). Rather than being a model or framework as such, intercultural language teaching and learning is an orientation or stance that is based on a conceptualization of three key concepts as foundational and interrelated: language, culture and learning (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Liddicoat, Scarino, Papademetre, & Kohler, 2003). What is foregrounded in this orientation is the process of movement, reflected in the ‘inter-’ prefix, as learners develop ways of navigating at least two languages and cultures in relation to each other. Learning to communicate therefore is understood as a process that is fundamentally interactive, not just as a social and or cognitive act but one that also involves interpretation (making sense of meanings, of others, and of self) and, as a result, transformation of the knowledge frameworks and identities of those involved. It is through learning to interpret the experience of communicating with others, bringing their own linguistic and cultural frames of reference that learners come to develop an alternative perspective and learn to ‘step out’ of their own frames, and see them from another vantage point. This ‘stepping out’ or ‘decentring’ (Crozet & Liddicoat, 2000; Kramsch, 1999) is a process that entails reflection; on the process of exchanging meanings across languages and cultures, and on the process of learning as inherently interpretive (Scarino, 2014). It is through this reflective dimension that learners come to both understand the nature of communication, and exchange of meanings across languages and cultures, and also to understand how these processes shape their identity. In this way, language learning within an intercultural orientation recognizes that what is exchanged in communication is not just ideas and information, but interpretations, assumptions and perspectives based on people’s histories and lived experiences. Curriculum Design Curriculum is a major vehicle through which theoretical understandings of language teaching within an intercultural orientation travel into practice. There are a number of well-known curriculum framework such

20

M. KOHLER

as the Council of Europe, Common European Framework of References (CEFR), the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages framework and the subsequent Can-Do Statements for Intercultural Communication (NCSSFL & ACTFL, 2017). Such frameworks provide statements designed to guide teachers in preparing their teaching and learning programs, particularly devising learning tasks, and in gauging and reporting learners’ performance, typically against different performance levels or outcome statements. Languages curricula also offer a construct or framing of curriculum through which the dimensions of language learning are articulated, and these vary in the extent to which they can be considered intercultural in orientation. The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is arguably the most prominent curriculum framework, outlining the knowledge, skills and strategies that learners should develop in order to be considered ‘communicatively competent’. In the context of Europe, the CEFR focuses on a central goal of language proficiency according to the European Union policy of ‘one plus two’ that is one first language, plus two foreign languages. The framework is organized according to four modes of communication; general competences, communicative language competences, communicative language activities, and communicative language strategies (including the recent addition of mediation) (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 30). While this framework has been adopted across much of Europe and some other regions around the world, it was not adopted in Australia during its national curriculum development process, due to perceptions of its underlying communicative orientation and its unsuitability for the Australian languages education context. The development of the Australian Curriculum commenced with the commissioning of a series of conceptual papers known as ‘Shape’ papers for each of the disciplines or learning areas within the curriculum. The structure of bands (years of study), strands and sub-strands (the disciplinary construct) and achievement standards (statements of learning typical at year level intervals) were common across all learning areas. Within each learning area, however, the aims and design of the construct were proposed in a Shape Paper that underwent substantial national consultation, and in Languages received very high levels of support from the field. The Languages design was underpinned by an intercultural and multilingual orientation with three interrelated aims:

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

21

– to communicate in the target language; – to understand language, culture, and learning and their relationship, and thereby develop an intercultural capability in communication; and – to understand oneself as a communicator (ACARA, 2011, p. 22). These aims were then realized through a set of strands and sub-strands that were the vehicle through which the dimensions of language learning were organised, as shown in Table 2.1. The sub-strands represent an interrelated set of dimensions of language learning with aspects such as mediation captured through the substrand of ‘translating/mediating’ and the reflective and reflexive aspects grounded in the sub-strand ‘reflecting’ and ‘the role of language and culture’ (see Kohler and Scarino [2018] and the Shape Paper for Languages [ACARA, 2011] for a fuller discussion of each aspect). Furthermore, the focus on reciprocal meaning exchange and interpretation is embedded throughout the design. For school language teachers, therefore, the curriculum provides a coherent conceptualisation of an intercultural orientation that may guide their planning, teaching, learning and assessment understandings and practices. Curriculum frameworks for languages teaching and learning across the world vary in the nature and extent to which they consider an intercultural orientation. Even those with strong interculturally oriented design largely assume that learners will develop if the curriculum objectives or content descriptions are followed, and learners’ development will be borne out Table 2.1 The set of strands and sub-strands of the Australian Curriculum: Languages Strand

Sub-strand

Communicating: Using language for communicative purposes in interpreting, creating and exchanging meaning

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3

Understanding: Analysing and understanding language and culture as resources for interpreting and shaping meaning in intercultural exchange

Socialising Informing Creating Translating/Mediating Reflecting Systems of language Language variation and change The role of language and culture

22

M. KOHLER

in the performance levels. For language/s teachers, while this provides a sense of what develops in generic terms, it is less clear as to how development occurs on an individual level, and how teachers may best plan for and support it in their own work. Pedagogical Stance If an intercultural orientation in language teaching is understood more as a ‘way of seeing and being’ than a methodology or ‘way of doing’ (Kohler, 2015), then there is a need to consider what underpins such a stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999; Scarino & Liddicoat 2009). There are a number of understandings upon which an interculturally oriented pedagogy rests and there have been attempts to articulate these (c.f. Crozet & Liddicoat, 2000; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Scarino, Kohler, & Benedetti, 2014). Those that are most pertinent to the matter of development may be encapsulated as follows: – That there are at least two languages and cultures coming into a relationship in language learning, and that learners will and should draw on these languages and their entire linguistic and cultural repertoire in their learning [multilingual and intercultural], – That who learners are and how they relate to the target language matters, and that all learners are diverse, and each is situated within their own languages, cultures, experiences, perspectives and life worlds that shape their learning [persons and personalisation], – That language and culture are the foundations of learning itself (Halliday, 1993), and in learning an additional language, learners are developing new linguistic and cultural knowledge and ways of being, recognizing that all knowledge, teaching and learning, and people, including themselves, are linguistically and culturally situated [knowledge and knowing], – That learning is both individual, cognitive (intrapsychological), and social, co-constructed (interpsychological), that requires knowledge acquisition, participation and interpretation (Scarino, 2014; Sfard, 1998), all of which involve mediation and meaning-making, both with knowledgeable others (interpersonal mediation), and for oneself (intrapersonal mediation) (Kohler, 2015) [mediation and meaningmaking],

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

23

– That intercultural language learning is a long-term developmental process of self transformation, requiring both reflection and reflexivity [transformation through reflection]. Each of these understandings informs the characteristics of an intercultural languages pedagogy that may be realized in practice, and that form a basis for developing intercultural language learning. While each is described separately here, these characteristics are best understood as integrated when considering how they are animated in practice. Multilingual and Intercultural In learning a language in addition to one’s primary language of socialization, there will necessarily be at least two languages and cultures involved. This means that learners, regardless of their backgrounds or contexts, are at a minimum bringing ‘one’ language and culture, to the learning of ‘one other’ language and culture (noting the problematic of defining any language as ‘bounded’). This is not a matter of adding or replacing the existing one with the new, but it is a process of re-ecologising learners’ overall linguistic and cultural framework. To do this, learners must build connections that make sense for themselves between the new and the existing language/s and culture/s. They engage in interpreting, adjusting and assimilating new forms, meanings, and ways of meaning, in a continual process of forming their communicative repertoire and linguistic and cultural identity. In terms of pedagogy, this means that learners are engaged from the outset in a process of connecting and relating two linguistic and cultural systems (or more for some students). This relational perspective impacts on pedagogy in terms of the resource available for stimulating learning, that is, content, and the interaction with it and with others. This expanded resource of language and culture, creates increased affordances (Van Lier, 2000) for learning and therefore pedagogy. There may be differing roles for the respective languages as both content, the substance of what is taught and learned, as well as for engaging with content, that is, as the medium for learning. Indeed, the distinctive feature of language is that it is both an object of learning and a medium for learning (Halliday, 1993). Consideration needs to be given to which language will perform which role, at which time, and what opportunities are available to explore the relationship between languages – again, both in terms of object and medium of learning. Furthermore, learners may be encouraged to use and

24

M. KOHLER

develop practices such as translanguaging and codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011; Garcia & Li Wei, 2015), as they attempt to build connections between languages and cultures. Recognising learners’ multiple languages and cultures in their learning offers increased opportunities for designing, and mediating, interaction and learning experiences. Learners will be involved in processes of interacting, noticing, comparing, and reflecting (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). In addition, by acknowledging and building on learners’ existing language/s and culture/s, there is scope to create a porous classroom, where learners’ experiences of language and culture in the wider world are actively drawn upon. This brings in learners’ own contexts and experiences, their environments and communities, both real and ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1991). A multilingual and intercultural orientation thus extends the focus of language learning beyond the additional language and culture, and its relationship to the home language and culture, to understanding language and culture per se. Persons and Personalisation The recognition of learners’ pre-existing language/s and culture/s as the foundation for their learning of a new language and culture, positions the learner at the centre of an intercultural orientation. Who learners are in terms of their knowledge, ways of knowing, experiences, aspirations, affiliations, needs, desires and interests are brought to bear in their learning. These influences, forged through one’s primary socialization and enculturation, come to represent a learner’s lifeworld (Scarino et al., 2014) and constitute the knowledge framework and interpretive lens through which new knowledge is constructed and new ways of knowing are developed. For learning to develop, therefore, it is necessary to know learners’ linguistic and cultural profiles and evolving state of their interpretive frameworks. Processes such as learner profiling, and diagnostic assessment are important in gathering information in order to more deeply understand learners’ linguistic and cultural biographies and trajectories, as a basis for developing learning. In addition to attending to who learners are and how they interpret new knowledge, is the related matter of who they can be. Consideration needs to be given to the subject positions and ‘identity potentials’ available to learners as they enter into new ways of interacting, knowing, meaning, and being in the world. In learning and using another language, learners’ take on the role of active participants, developing and using their

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

25

languages for communicating and interacting with others. At the same time, learners are making connections, being attentive to how language works, the new and their own, and learning how to move between them. In this sense, they take on the role of analysts, exploring the system of language, developing a meta-language for talking about language, and considering the connections between language and culture. Furthermore, learners are making judgments about the ‘new’, engaging, reacting and adjusting to it, and evaluating which aspects to take on board or not as part of their identity. In an intercultural perspective, thus, learners have multiple roles as performers, analysers and persons (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). In order for learners to take on these roles, they need to be afforded opportunities that are meaningful to them, who they are and who they want to be. Typically, in language teaching, activities and tasks have assumed a native speaker like role for learners who have been required to be someone other than who they are, for example, role play being a becak driver, or order food in a restaurant (in the target language country). Not only are these mainly transactional in nature positioning learners as users of the target language, and thereby language as something ‘to be used and useful’, these kinds of roles also require learners to be inauthentic. While this could be seen as imaginative or creative at one level, and as a safe way of rehearsing how to use the target language in a scenario that approximates the ‘real world’, it can also leave learners ‘playing’ a role (as an actor or student of drama might), pretending to be someone they cannot and may not want to be (Kohler, 2015). An intercultural orientation invites learners to be themselves, that is emergent bi-/multilinguals who bring their own knowledge, experiences, assumptions, and values to learning. They do not ‘leave behind’ who they are but rather it is brought to the fore as the primary resource for engaging with and experiencing the new. It is by seeing the individual as a person who is endowed with a language (or languages) and a culture (or cultures), who embodies languages and cultures, who is shaped and formed by languages and cultures, and who expresses him/herself through languages and cultures. The languages and cultures a learner brings to the learning of a new language are a repertoire for meaning-making and a repertoire that is being enlarged in and through learning. (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013, p. 56)

26

M. KOHLER

A pedagogical stance that takes into account who learners are and who they can and may want to be through their language learning, provides opportunities for learners to take on various subject positions, for example, as observer, as analyst, as ‘real and ‘imagined’ self, and as self in relation to other, and as self in relation to self (over time). The identity positions that learners can take have the potential to draw them in and/or alienate them from the target language and culture. Positionality is part of what creates relevance for learners, and their potential to engage with learning the target language and culture. ‘Relevance’ is often taken to mean something of interest or something contemporary; however, it can also be understood more broadly as ‘meaningfulness’, as something that has significance for learners. In this sense, what may be considered as relevant for learners is wide-ranging, and in fact, is dependent on learners themselves. It highlights the need for learners to be the starting point for developing teaching and learning programs, and for teachers being highly attuned to learners in the selection of content, texts and resources, as well as their pedagogy. Knowledge and Knowing A further characteristic of an intercultural orientation is that it recognizes the importance of knowledge, of knowledge getting and ways of knowing. Typically in language teaching, knowledge has been understood within a structural view of language, with an emphasis on form such as vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. This focus on content as linguistic code in the main has tended to create a sense that language learning involves acquiring a body of knowledge, a new linguistic code that can take the place of an existing code. As such, learners are effectively replacing their existing means for knowing the world, with another means, leading often to an over-emphasis on labelling and describing. In doing so, language program content becomes dominated by description, for example, of people, the neighbourhood, daily routines, transport and restaurants. This prevailing view foregrounds language as content or object of study, and the notion of language as a medium for learning, that is, as a carrier of ideational knowledge is less prominent. This latter view becomes particularly significant within an intercultural orientation, as there is recognition that knowledge itself is linguistically and culturally created, and that all learning takes place through language; language carries knowledge. As such, in learning an additional language, there is a necessary learning of new ideas and information; there must be ‘something to language about’. Hence, ideas and concepts become important

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

27

in considering the substance of learning; the content to be ‘languaged’, as well as the content needed to do the ‘languaging’ (Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman, 2015). Using concepts as a basis for developing language program content offers the potential to enter into new kinds of knowledge, new ideas, new experiences and worldviews that are enmeshed within the target language. The aim of learning, therefore, is not just to acquire the linguistic code but also to understand the meaning potentials embedded within it. Concepts represent a vehicle through which both ideational and linguistic content can be considered, compared and understood in relation to one’s own conceptual framework. It is at the more abstract ideational level of concept that knowledge can be expanded, as learners gain insights into how concepts may be understood in new ways, or indeed how new ideas may be discovered through learning another language. Concepts are particularly helpful in planning teaching and learning programs, and identifying what will be taught and learned, that is, content. They can act as a means for selecting and organizing content related to the target language and culture that connects with learners’ own knowledge frameworks, and offers points for potential expansion of them. For example, the expression in Indonesian jam karet (lit. rubber time) connotes the idea of time as a flexible substance, as compared to English; for example, with expressions such as ‘in the nick of time’ or ‘time is money’ suggesting time is a fixed or measurable quantity (both literally and abstractly, monetarily). The concept of ‘time’ allows for these possibilities and more, including those that learners may already bring from their own enculturation. Concepts therefore can enable intercultural comparison leading to knowledge expansion, and are therefore, particularly important for considering development – as will be discussed further. In developing teaching and learning programs within an intercultural orientation, consideration needs to be given to concepts that are both general and specific to the target language and culture. General concepts are those that may be found in a range of discipline areas such as the scientific concept of motion or the health concept of nutrition. They may also be those that are particularly pertinent to a language and culture such as gotong-royong (reciprocal assistance) in Indonesian, or uchi-soto (inner-outer spheres of influence) in Japanese. Although translated here to convey some sense of these ideas, this type of concept is not readily amenable to translation as its significance is carried in the language itself,

28

M. KOHLER

and there is no equivalent concept in other languages. Furthermore, concepts may be abstract ideas that are concepts in their own right, for example ‘language’, as well as concepts that relate to procedural knowledge, for example ‘mediating’. Concepts thus represent substantive content to be taught and learned, as well as enabling meaningful connections for learners between their existing knowledge and new learning, including connections to knowledge across disciplines. The emphasis on abstraction that working with concepts enables also means that learners are encouraged to develop a capacity for abstraction themselves, and move beyond particular instances or surface comparisons of similarities and differences to more abstracted understandings of language-and-culture related phenomena and experiences. Mediation and Meaning Making Another characteristic of an intercultural orientation is that it recognizes that learning is not only a process of individual cognition leading to knowledge acquisition, but that learning occurs through interaction with others. In this sense, learning is understood as both a process of acquiring or accumulating a body of knowledge, as well as constructing knowledge through participating in a particular group or community (Sfard, 1998). In addition, learning can also be understood as a form of action, and the very act of learning is a creative process that can lead to the generation of new knowledge (Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2004). These processes are not independent of the learners who undertake them, and learning can thus also be viewed as an interpretive and situated process. This hermeneutic perspective suggests that learning is a kind of embodied or lived interpretation that involves learners enacting their interpretive frames as they encounter new ideas, information and experiences (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Thus, learning is a process of interpreting knowledge, ways of knowing, and the knowers, those who embody knowledge, including teachers and learners themselves (Scarino, 2014). In the context of learning an additional language and culture, interaction involves learning to navigate new meanings and ways of making meaning in diverse contexts. It is an interpersonal or social process that involves mutually exchanging and interpreting ideas and information, as well as the participants themselves. It is also an intrapersonal or individual process, of making sense for oneself as well as making sense of oneself, through the learning experience. These views of learning place a premium on social participation and mediation, understood as:

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

29

… the process through which humans deploy culturally constructed artifacts, concepts , and activities to regulate (i.e. gain voluntary control over and transform) the material world or their own and each other’s social and mental activity. (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 79)

Mediation takes on even more significance as learners are engaged in interactions where the cultural artifacts, concepts and activities are unfamiliar, and where the major mediating tool, language, is also unfamiliar and still being acquired. Learning to communicate across languages and cultures, therefore, involves the co-construction of meaning where there can be no taken-for-granted cultural knowledge or shared mediating tool of language, for making sense of new ideas, information and experiences. Learning becomes a process of realizing meaning-making potentials that are available (Kearney, 2016) through using various mediating devices, processes and experiences to bridge gaps in the learner’s knowledge. In the classroom, learning is mediated in interaction principally through language. The discursive practices of teachers and learners, in their interactions with each other, as well as their interactions with artifacts, particularly texts, represent the primary means through which knowledge is mediated and co-constructed. As the expert or ‘more knowledgeable other’ (Vygotsky, 1978b), the teacher uses language to present new knowledge and to scaffold learners’ understandings such as through explanation, exemplification, narrating, and making connections of various kinds. In particular, the questions that teachers pose significantly shape the learning possibilities, sometimes opening up multiple interpretations, and other times narrowing in on a particular focus or discrete aspect. Teachers can invite learners make connections between unfamiliar ideas, experiences and perspectives, and their existing ones in ways that are meaningful to them personally. This sense of relationality, of the continual process of connecting the new to the existing, extends beyond the noticing of similarities and differences of phenomena that can remain ‘outside’ of the individual, and is instead a process of sensemaking and internalizing the ‘new’ such that it becomes part of one’s own framework of knowledge and understanding. The teacher’s use of language plays a pivotal role in establishing the classroom culture and nature of interaction that enables mediation within this relational, interpretive view of language learning. It means that teachers need to invite interpretation through asking open-ended

30

M. KOHLER

questions such as, ‘What do you make of this? Why do you see it that way?’ It means drawing out a range of perspectives across the group of learners, ‘What do you think of Ari’s reaction? Do you agree? Why/why not?’ Through instruction and facilitated interaction, learners can be encouraged to notice language choices, offer interpretations and reactions, and consider aspects such as the situatedness of participants, and how their linguistic and cultural make-up impacts on interaction and meaning. Teachers can also facilitate deeper learning through processes of layering that include building connections across learners’ responses, for example, asking ‘Why do you think Zainah has that view’ or ‘What do you think Sara should do? What is your view based on?’ In this way, teachers use their discursive repertoires to draw on the perspectives, values and experiences of learners, as a resource for individual and collective learning. In addition to the mediating resources of the teacher’s discursive practices, and the lifeworlds that learners bring to their learning, are the more familiar artefacts associated with language classrooms such as texts and realia. Texts of various kinds become mediating resources in language teaching and learning including as a stimulus for interaction, as models and examples, and as reference points. Texts represent instantiations of language and culture, and the texts that teachers select convey various messages to learners about the nature and value of what is being presented and its significance in language learning. An intercultural orientation does not necessarily require any particular kinds of texts, although texts created for use within the culture of the language of study are closer to authentic language use and meanings than ‘artificial’ texts created principally for the purpose of language learning (often to develop grammatical competence). It is both the range of texts and what teachers do with them that is most important in creating meaning-making potentials for intercultural language learning (Kearney, 2016). Texts of all types, ranging in complexity and origin, and offering diverse perspectives and representations of language and culture are needed. Texts may come from different historical periods, or groups, or use multiple languages such as those found increasingly in public texts for example signs or websites. Teachers can facilitate learners’ interpretations of texts by encouraging processes such as comparison, juxtaposition, critical analysis and evaluation of the ideas, meanings, values, and impact of the texts on individual learners and across the group of learners. An important consideration for teachers in working with texts is the affordances that are created through their use, and in particular, the

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

31

subject positions that are available to learners in engaging with them. The nature of the text and interaction with it will determine to a large extent what is permissible for learners to do, and who they are permitted to be. That is, will they be positioned, for example, as outsiders or observers of ‘others’? Can they be themselves or do they take on being someone else? Are they an emergent bilingual learner with their own affiliations, aspirations and desires, or should they act like a native speaker? This kind of teaching can be demanding, as it is dynamic and highly responsive and may even be confronting if there is to be genuine openness to who learners are and what they bring to learning. It requires a learning culture that values and encourages openness, curiosity, multiplicity and variability, and at times ambiguity and divergence. This ‘pedagogy of personalisation’ is in itself rich but for it to be transformative, it also needs to involve reflection. Transformation Through Reflection Reflection is a characteristic of intercultural language teaching that recognizes that the learner is not just learning to communicate in another language but is expanding their repertoires for making meaning, interacting in, and understanding the world. There are different kinds of reflection that can lead to more or less profound learning. Reflection can be of the kind that focuses on ideational content, for example, concepts, phenomena, or perspectives. In this case, reflection involves making observations about what is presented, and considering the nature of the phenomenon, ideas, or perspectives and how these are conveyed through language. This can be considered as intercultural reflection (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013) or ‘reflection on other’; be that the subject matter or individuals apart from the learner. There is also the kind of reflection that turns back on the learner, in the form of ‘reflection on self’. This intracultural reflection (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013) involves learners in distancing themselves from their own interaction and language use, and considering how this is shaped by their linguistic and cultural frameworks. Developing an understanding of the linguistically and culturally constructed nature of language use and meaning-making, and becoming aware of how this applies to oneself, is a crucial part of symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006, 2011). Learners are not only learning to communicate within a particular community and to reflect on their communication, but they are coming to understand that meaning making is a form of symbolic action. This insight is what becomes powerful in

32

M. KOHLER

the potential transformation of learners, as they are not only analysers of language but they are aware of, and potentially able to use, its power in shaping interaction and their own identity. Recognising the symbolic force of language creates the possibility for not only critiquing norms and power positions but also for imagining alternatives, and within this imagining oneself in new ways. This is not a passive kind of learning but rather ‘if the individual learns to see him/herself through his/her own embodied history and subjectivity and through the history and subjectivity of others’ (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008), creates the potential for learners to act in new ways, to expand how they mean and to reframe events through critically performing their new linguistic and cultural repertoires (Kramsch, 2011). The kind of ‘mindset’ that can be developed through developing symbolic competence needs to be nurtured through language teaching that draws attention to language and language use as variable, contingent, and historically and ideologically situated. Learners need opportunities to analyse, question, investigate, hypothesise and consider alternatives to what they encounter. They need to consider how ideas, values, and perspectives are reflected in language use, and to reflect on the norms and assumptions underpinning their own reactions and interpretations of phenomena. This process of becoming aware of language use as socially and culturally constructed, and historically and ideologically situated, requires learners to reflect on themselves; that is, it requires reflexivity. This deep form of reflection enables the language learner to see the interconnectedness and inbetweenness of subject positions, and consider ‘becoming something more’ (Byrd Clark, 2020, p. 95). Developing the capacity for reflexivity through intercultural language learning is an ongoing process that can lead an individual to new identity possibilities, and potentially, greater empathy and compassion (Byrd Clark, 2020; Levine, 2020). In this section, I have outlined a number of characteristics that are pertinent to an intercultural orientation in language teaching, and are developmental in nature. While these have been separated for the purpose of discussion and consideration of the nature of each, in the practice of language teaching and learning these form a holistic pedagogical stance that informs all aspects of practice. I will return to these characteristics in the discussion of the sustained case study presented in Chapters 3–5.

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

33

Understandings of Development If we consider language learning as a transformative process that involves learners not just acquiring knowledge but entering into new ways of being, then we need to consider how this process occurs and, for language teachers, how to facilitate it. This raises the complex matter of ‘development’. Traditionally, second language acquisition has focused on development in terms of the acquisition of linguistic structures; accumulating increasingly sophisticated forms over time to form the learner’s body of knowledge. This rather structural view tended to separate language into parts, that were then sequenced in an order assumed to best lead to their assimilation into a working whole. Development or progress in learning was considered as a process of assembling parts language, aiming to assemble a sufficient amount to be likened to a native speaker. The notion of development became more complex within a communicative approach to language teaching, as it was associated with increasing learners’ language use through an expanded range and demands of communicative tasks. Development was thus synonymous with capacity to appropriately perform an increasing range of language functions within a wide range of contexts. This capacity was also regarded as influenced by the immediate context or environment, and the nature and degree of support available. The more learners could perform without support, the more they were considered to have ‘developed’ their communicative competence. Given the nature of intercultural language learning, with its emphasis on interpretation, variability, and unfinalisability, these views of development in language learning are insufficient. SLA and Second Language Development The need to consider alternative framings of development has been recognised within the field of SLA by scholars such as Larsen-Freeman (2015) who draws on complexity theory to argue for a shift from second language acquisition to second language development. This is not, according to Larsen-Freeman, a simple substitution but one that has significant consequences because it starts with a view of language itself as a complex adaptive system, having multiple, interrelated parts that operate in a dynamic process of interaction and that also gives rise to change within the system itself. Crucially, in this view, language is not something to

34

M. KOHLER

be ‘obtained’ by the learner (as one might assemble mechanical parts to compile an engine) but rather it is an ‘ever-evolving resource’ that emerges through multiple, iterative instances of language use: Language development is no longer seen as a process of acquiring abstract rules, but as the EMERGENCE of language ability through us in real time. Constructions emerge in learner production in a bottom-up fashion from frequently occurring patters of language use rather than as a priori components of fixed, autonomous, closed, and synchronic systems. (Larsen-Freeman, 2015, p. 494)

This view of language development also accounts for the possibility of progress as well as regress, as learners constantly adapt their language knowledge through new instances and new information (de Bot & Larsen-Freeman, 2011). The important point here for considering development within an intercultural orientation, is that there is no unitary or fixed body of knowledge to be acquired by learners, and that instead repeated exposure to, and exploration of instances of real-world language use, can provide a firm basis for on-going language development. Within a complex dynamic systems view, there is also recognition that language gets created through use, that language can be generated through play and experimentation not as an aberration or error but as a normal part of its ‘autopoietic’ nature (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). Furthermore, and importantly for an intercultural orientation, is the idea that language is a social accomplishment and that interaction involves a kind of mutual attunement or co-adaptation both to each other and to the context in which the interaction occurs. This foregrounds the notion of reciprocal interpretation, as well as the crucial role that context plays, not just as a site of interaction but also as a shaper of it and its participants. The context of the language classroom can therefore be understood as influencing interaction and learning, as well as being influenced by it. As learners and teachers engage with each other, and others beyond the classroom, their diverse languages, cultures and lifeworlds interplay in a kind of dynamic dance. That is, …learners learn to use language, like the steps in a dance, through repeated activity in slightly different situations. Learning is not a linear, additive process, but an iterative one. Linguistic structures do not only symbolize reality; they are used to actively construct reality in interaction with others (Kramsch & Whiteside 2008). (Larsen-Freeman, 2015, p. 502)

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

35

Complexity theory has provided valuable insights for considering how second language acquisition may be more fruitfully conceived as second language development . It is worth considering how the notion of development itself might be understood in order to explore how it may apply specifically to language teaching and learning within an intercultural orientation. The Bioecological Model of Human Development There is substantial work within the field of psychology related to human development, and in particular child development. A great deal of the research has focused on the role that the environment or context plays in shaping development and while this emphasis has been necessary, according to Bronfenbrenner and Morris (2007) there has been too much focus on context and not enough on processes of development. They propose the bioecological model of human development in which development is defined as: …the phenomenon of continuity and change in the biopsychological characteristics of human beings, both as individuals and as groups. The phenomenon extends over the life course, across successive generations, and through historical time, both past and future. (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007, p. 793)

The model consists of four interrelated properties that includes processes, as well as context, and adds a further aspect of time: process, person, context, time. Similar to the complex dynamic system perspective, the model is premised on an ecological view that recognizes the interdependence and interaction between the four variables and the dynamic nature of them. There is interplay between these properties in that people interact with their environments (context) over time (time) and the nature of interaction (process) varies depending on the characteristics of the person (person). Each of these properties can be further elaborated to appreciate the complex interplay at work in human development. The property of ‘process’ refers to ‘proximal processes’ that pertain to the interaction between an individual and others, and with artefacts and symbols. These are the processes that occur between individuals and, for example, their families, friends, school, or neighbourhood community. The second property

36

M. KOHLER

of ‘person’ refers to the characteristics of individuals, including their dispositions, abilities, knowledge and skills. People are shaped by these at different stages of development, and these influence the nature of interaction that people have with their social environments. The third property of ‘context’ relates to the environment, understood as a system comprising micro and macro contexts. This could include, for example, the macro context of education and its associated ideologies, as well as the micro level of particular sites of teaching and learning such as classrooms, and their associated physical attributes such as artefacts and teaching resources. This property recognizes that these contexts are nested, and thus interrelated. The final, and arguably most novel property is that of time. Prior to the bioecological model, there had been little attention to time and its role in understanding development, however its incorporation has highlighted the need to consider time, or more specifically, three levels of time: micro, meso and macro. Each level is contributory to the long-term effects of time. Microtime is the level at which proximal processes occur, either in a continuous manner or in an irregular or disrupted manner. At the next level, mesotime, there are broader intervals of time that may be episodic or connected such as days and weeks. At the broadest level, macrotime refers to the sweeping periods of time within a society, across generations or over an individual’s lifetime. Taken together, these properties have provided a framework for considering development and its role in contributing to large-scale changes in society over time. The properties, and their interconnectedness, offers a means also for considering development on a smaller scale, such as for a particular course and, importantly, for individual learners. There are two propositions associated with the bioecological model that are synergistic with language teaching and learning within an intercultural orientation. Firstly, human development occurs through processes of interaction between individuals (biopyschological human organisms) and other individuals, objects and symbols in given contexts. These interactions are by nature reciprocal and become increasingly more complex as the interactions take place over time. In fact, for development to occur, interactions need to happen regularly over extended periods, such as when a parent plays with a child, or when a child attends school, or when a person learns a musical instrument or an additional language. The second proposition is that these interactions, or proximal processes, are the primary means through which development occurs, as they are the basis for internalisation; the process whereby an individual integrates

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

37

certain values, behaviours and attitudes into their sense of self. According to the theory, the nature and impact of these processes will vary according to the characteristics of the person, the environment (both immediate and more distant), and the time in which these take place, both in terms of the lifespan of the person, and the historical period in which he/she is living. In sum, the model proposes that development occurs when a person engages in activity (with other people, objects or symbols) fairly regularly, and with increasing complexity, and there is reciprocity in the interaction; and all of this is influenced by a person’s characteristics such as age or their relationships with others e.g. family. Thus, development needs to be understood as contingent on the past as well as the present, and on the actions and choices made by individuals in relation to the opportunities available to them in particular contexts. As a result, development will necessarily be different for different people, setting them on their own distinctive life courses. Experiential Learning A further crucial element in the bioecological model is that of ‘experience’. When a person interacts in an environment, it is not only the physical or objective properties of it that impact on development but also the way in which the properties are perceived by the person involved. There is therefore a need to consider both the objective or phenomenological, as well as the subjective or experiential nature of development. This brings in the affective dimension of development also as experience is closely tied to emotions and feelings: …experience pertains to the realm of feelings – anticipations, forebodings, hopes, doubts, or personal beliefs. Feelings, emerging in early childhood and continuing through life, are characterized by both stability and change. They can relate to self or to others, especially family, friends, and other close associates. They can also apply to the activities in which we engage: for example, those that we most or least like to do. But the most distinctive features of such experiential qualities is that they are emotionally and motivationally loaded. (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007, p. 797)

Furthermore, the emotional load of experiences, both of the positive and negative kind, travels over time and experiences from the past can be highly influential in experiences in the present and into the future. The

38

M. KOHLER

powerful role that affect can play in development is increasingly being recognized in the field of language acquisition also (Bigelow, 2019; Prior, 2019). The notion of ‘experience’ has featured to some extent in languages education largely in relation to in-country study programs. Work has focused on the impact of preparatory courses and in situ experiences on learners, as reported in post-program evaluations (c.f. Jackson 2014). According to Dervin (2017), while this work has been invaluable, in order to truly realise interculturality there is a need to pay greater attention to experience not only outside the classroom but also inside it. He adopts a set of principles for experiential learning outlined by Passarelli and Kolb (2012) as a basis for considering interculturality. The six principles are: 1. Learning is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes; 2. All learning is re-learning; 3. Learning requires the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world; 4. Learning is a holistic process of adaptation; 5. Learning results from synergetic transactions between the person and the environment; and 6. Learning is the process of creating knowledge. (Dervin, 2017, p. 91) When applied to the context of language learning within an intercultural orientation, these principles foreground language learning itself as an experiential process, in which the associated knowledge, skills, and dispositions are not static but rather continue to evolve through each new interaction. That is, as captured in the principles, all learning is re-learning and with every new interaction, there is an adaptation to the environment, and an adjustment to one’s existing knowledge. Thus, experiential learning involves a kind of dialectic between action/reflection and experience/abstraction, and it is this interplay that is particularly beneficial for interculturality as it renders it more critical, reflexive, and transformative (Dervin, 2017). Specifically in relation to intercultural language teaching and learning, Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) proposed a shift away from ‘task’ as the dominant framing for organizing learning in teaching programs, in favour of ‘experience’. They argue that task tends to emphasise ‘action’, what

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

39

is done, whereas experience emphasizes what is lived. The latter recognizes that when learners engage in learning experiences, they not only participate in the experience itself, but they are also noticing and considering the role of language and culture, and reflecting on both what they have learned and how they have learned it. In this way, an experience can be understood as a kind of action/interaction that has three facets: participation, analysis, and reflection (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). The reflective facet is what renders the intercultural interaction meaningful for the learner as they take their learning to a more abstract level of understanding, and then through thinking about themselves in relation to others and the experience of intercultural exchange, they develop insights into themselves as intercultural communicators. The notion of ‘experience’ therefore represents a powerful means for considering language learning within an intercultural orientation. It enables an expansion of language learning that is more closely aligned with the idea of interculturality as a process of becoming in which learners continually encounter new experiences, and through analysis and reflection, are changed by them. From the learner’s perspective, each new experience builds on previous experiences, both in relation to the language and culture being learned and the learner’s existing language/s and culture/s. There is an iterative process that involves learners in noticing, comparing, reflecting and interacting (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Each experience becomes a foundation upon which additional experiences are interpreted and integrated as part of one’s store of experiences, and ever-evolving interpretive frames, and sense of self that learners carry into subsequent experiences. This store, or accumulation of experiences, does not just expand regardless but rather it depends on what is significant to the learner. That is, the learner is likely to integrate or retain something from a new experience if there is something meaningful or memorable about it. The experience of interacting across languages and cultures typically involves the need to navigate meaning systems and understandings, often leading to varied responses of those involved. The process of coconstructing meaning in intercultural exchange may produce any number of feelings- satisfaction, frustration, discomfort, humour, curiosity etc. These reactions can result in memorable moments and become integrated into a learner’s experiential repertoire, and ultimately their identity. Such moments represent opportunities for further learning also as an individual reflects on why they (and/or their interlocutor/s) reacted as they did, and consider how either may have reacted differently. It is important,

40

M. KOHLER

therefore, that the whole enterprise of language learning is understood as experiential, and that learners are presented with experiences that actively draw on who they are and what is important in their lifeworlds. Development Within an Intercultural Language Teaching Orientation The notion of development in relation to intercultural education and language learning has been acknowledged as important particularly for learners’ identity development, for example: …the development of students’ (multilingual and multicultural) identities is a crucial matter in which language educators have a special responsibility. All language educators need to address the whole student and give students the opportunity to develop their language skills and their identity through interactions with others of other cultural affiliations. (Byram & Wagner, 2018, p. 147)

There is also recognition of the developmental nature of intercultural language learning and the need to plan teaching and learning programs in order to cater for development (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Liddicoat, Scarino, Papademetre, & Kohler, 2003). While there has been limited explicit investigation of development within an intercultural language learning orientation, approaches to planning for development in language learning more broadly, and some specifically related to intercultural language learning, offer some valuable insights and considerations. In order to understand development in any kind of language teaching and learning it is necessary to consider the idea of complexity, both in relation to what becomes more complex and how, over time. Traditionally in language teaching, complexity has been understood as a matter of acquiring linguistic structures, beginning with ‘simple’ units of language, and progressively accumulating more difficult ones. This structural view foregrounds linguistic forms as the primary content for learning and the assimilation of forms in the mind of the individual as the basis for development. More communicatively oriented language teaching tends to view development as the ability to use the target language in increasingly complex contexts, particularly those found in the target language culture. The underpinning basis for development in this view is increasing one’s ability to manage the communicative demands of particular contexts, with grammar and vocabulary important but determined by

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

41

the context. Within this view, the notion of ‘task’ is foregrounded as an organizational vehicle for teaching and learning, and a means to increase learning demands, since tasks can encompass linguistic complexity, cognitive complexity, and differing conditions (Skehan, 1996). That is, tasks can be viewed as being more or less difficult according to the language content, processing demands, and support available to undertake them. As such tasks are useful for sequencing teaching and learning as the variables can be altered to increase demands over time. The useful notion here in relation to development is the need to have an organizational vehicle that can carry variables that can be made more or less demanding over time. While also within a communicative orientation and sharing the concern for complexification in learning over time, Byrnes, Maxim, and Norris (2010) developed an entire curriculum specifically for writing for advanced second language learners. In this ten-year longitudinal study, the project team used a systemic functional linguistics theory of language as the foundation for developing the curriculum, as it offered an integrated view of language in use, and literary-cultural content in text. By working with the notion of genre as the key organiser of the content, the curriculum was able to address both linguistic and disciplinary content at the same time. Noting that this study was not framed within an intercultural orientation per se, it is important for considering development as it did adopt an integrated view of language and culture, and explicitly address the notion of increased sophistication in language learning over time. The study highlights the need to take a long-term view of development and attend to the increasing demands associated with multiple and interrelated dimensions of content; linguistic (at the textual level) and discipline-related knowledge. The relationship between language, culture and content is fundamental to human development and to intercultural language learning. In coming to learn a language and culture additional to one’s own, learners enter into a new linguistic and cultural system that carries particular ideas and ways of understanding the world. Language is the primary vehicle through which we come to know and participate in the world. When we learn a language, we learn the ways to think about phenomena and our experience of it, and this ‘thinking’ takes the form of big ideas or concepts. Each time we have an experience, we form thoughts about it, and have ways of identifying it, sharing and recalling it, reflecting on it, and each time, making sense of it for ourselves at that given moment.

42

M. KOHLER

One of the devices that we have for managing experience is ‘concepts’, and these help us to reason and abstract our understandings beyond any single instance or experience, to multiple instances and manifestations of phenomena that we experience over time (Gelman & Kalish, 2007). Concepts therefore are the ideational tools that help us organize the world and interpret our experience in it – and these are not common to all humans, but rather are generated within particular groups at particular times. Concepts are shared through language, and thus in learning a new language we are learning new ways to understand phenomena and experience, at increasingly more abstract levels, and increasingly expanding our conceptual frames over time. Given the importance of concepts in developing our understandings of the world, concepts are particularly significant for learners who are, through learning an additional language and culture, encountering new ideas about the world. There is a dialectic between the two (at least) conceptual systems that becomes a basis for inter-linguistic and intercultural learning, and a basis for expanding learning, or development. While recognising that concepts are not the only form of content to be addressed, Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) argue that concepts are particularly valuable for interculturally oriented programs as they represent big ideas, beliefs and issues from various domains of human endeavor. Concepts can act as a kind of umbrella for planning, as other dimensions of learning such as textual and linguistic content from different domains, can be addressed as part of fleshing out and exploring the concept. Furthermore, since concepts organize experience, they come to represent ways of understanding experience that are crucial for participating in a new linguistic and cultural world of experiences. There is therefore a close relationship between concepts, experiences and interactions, which requires language use and interpersonal and intrapersonal processes of engagement. By operating at the level of concepts, there is also the potential to make connections between ideas, and to create macro understandings or theories (Gelman & Kalish, 2007) that transcend specific domains and contribute to learners’ overarching framework of knowledge. Hence, concept-based planning has the potential to address ideational, linguistic and textual content, as well as language use through interactions and experiences. Since concepts can be drawn from any domain, there is a need to consider the basis for their selection, in order to maximise their potential in building connections in learning, within concepts, between

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

43

concepts, and across conceptual systems. Traditionally, within linguistically oriented planning, content has been selected according to a ‘building block’ view of both language and learning. This has resulted in programs presenting single items or small chunks of content that are assumed to accumulate into a coherent set of knowledge. While it is possible to treat concepts in this structural way, if the role of interpretation in understanding experience is taken into account concepts can be selected based on lived experiences, including those of learners. Understanding concepts within an interpretive frame means that they are not amenable to being separated or treated in part, as interpretation itself is a holistic act that takes place fully each time there is an occurrence, including in the process of reinterpretation (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Furthermore, the degree of simplicity or complexity of an interpretation, which is important in considering development, is not a matter of its degree of completeness but rather of its nature: A simple interpretation is no less an interpretation than a complex interpretation. The difference lies in the nature, extent, and elaboration of the interpretation or the sophistication with which an interpretation is expressed, asserted, or defended. (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013, p. 151)

Thus, in planning for development of intercultural language learning there needs to be a suite of concepts and learning experiences, that are connected, and offer opportunities for increasingly complex processes of interpretation over time. Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) identify a number of these processes: elaborating (providing more developed, intricate or refined interpretations), explaining (accounting for and communicating one’s interpretations to others), exemplifying (relating interpretations to instances of experience), relating (bringing together different interpretations from different people or periods), and reformulating (modifying interpretations based on new information or ideas obtained from experiences of language and culture or from interactions with others about experiences). These interpretive processes are essential for understanding concepts and a new conceptual system associated with an additional language and culture, and need to be fostered in an on-going and recursive manner as a basis for development.

44

M. KOHLER

Similarly to concepts, experiences have the potential to be limitless, and therefore consideration needs to be given to the kinds of experiences most suited to intercultural language learning. Studies have often focused on in-country study experiences in fostering intercultural learning however there has been less focus on investigating learning experiences within the classroom itself. One such study is that by Kearney (2016) who investigated how the language classroom might be understood as a semiotic space that yields opportunities for intercultural learning. The study, conducted over a semester of a tertiary French as a foreign language course, aimed to investigate the pedagogic practices of the language teacher, Emilie. In an effort to engage her students more emotionally in their language learning, Emilie designed a semester-long project for them, using a global simulation task. She wanted her students to not just engage intellectually with the facts and information about the Second World War, but to ‘project themselves’ into the lives of those in Paris at the time. Global simulation offered an envelope within which the teacher could plan and teach content over an extended period, through the framework provided by the, historically grounded, yet fictional world of Paris during World War II. Emilie’s students created their own fictional character in the imagined community and were required to collaborate with their peers, also characters in the scenario, to complete a series of tasks over a period of time, both in the past and present sense. The simulation task provided the opportunity for students to ‘experience’ the world of the past through exploring texts that were deeply rooted in factual details and emotional resonances. The students engaged in processes of narrating, interpreting cultural representations, taking different perspectives, and voicing and acting out scenarios over an extended period. While the case study of Emilie was primarily concerned with the ‘meaning-making potentials’ in classroom interaction and the need to attend more to the linguistic and metalinguistic dimensions of intercultural learning, it also highlights the importance of a clear and interrelated series of experiences that enable learners to engage emotionally in the lives and perspectives of others. The experiential and affective learning arising from the global simulation experience, culminating in a final ‘performance’, are important considerations for development of intercultural language learning. While not framed explicitly as an experience-based approach, work in the area of intercultural citizenship education (ICE) shares some characteristics of this as it attempts to develop civic-minded individuals who aspire to change the world for the better (Byram, 2008, 2010, 2014).

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

45

That is, ICE focuses on learners engaging in community-based action in the form of tasks or projects that are designed to develop their political and ethical awareness and agency, for example critically analysing texts or developing literacy and advocacy materials (Porto, Houghton, & Byram, 2017). In following up on one study, a transnational project carried out over a year involving students in Argentina, the United Kingdom and Italy, Porto (2019) investigated the long-term impact of the projects on learners. The original projects had four stages: introduction (involving preliminary research), awareness-raising, dialogue, and citizenship (taking some form of action). Some two to four years later, the Argentinian students were asked to complete retrospective logs about the experience. The analyses showed that students had observed some impact of the projects on their language and content learning, and language awareness. In addition, the students recalled the emotional engagement that they had with important issues and critical content. Even though most of the students had not become involved in further civic activities, they recognised that they had developed a degree of critical awareness and self-awareness, particularly noting memorable experiences of engaging with contentious or sensitive political matters. This study reinforces the importance of taking a long-term perspective on interculturally oriented language learning, and illustrates the need to design experiences in which learners can engage critically and ethically with ideas, issues and beliefs in order to develop their political and self-awareness.

Conclusion The discussion in this chapter has outlined the major shifts in the field of second language acquisition and languages education that have prompted interest in interculturally oriented language teaching and learning. There is a growing body of research related to teachers’ understandings and classroom practices, particularly in the areas of program design and pedagogical approaches. There has been little attention thus far within this orientation to the notion of ‘development’ per se and how language teachers understand and attend to it in practice. Ecological perspectives on language, languages teaching (Kramsch, 2008; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; Levine, 2020; Van Lier, 2004) and human development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007) offer important insights for understanding development within an intercultural language learning orientation. In addition to traditional aspects such as

46

M. KOHLER

linguistic (and metalinguistic) development, there is a need to attend to conceptual, experiential, affective, interpretive, political and ethical dimensions of development. An ecological view posits that it is not sufficient to attend to any one or cluster of these aspects alone but rather all of them need to be addressed to varying degrees simultaneously, in ways that are interconnected and become increasingly sophisticated over time, in order for development to occur. Understanding and keeping all of these aspects of development in play over time, is no small feat and yet it is precisely this that language teachers need to achieve in designing and enacting teaching, learning and assessment that can foster intercultural language learning. There is a need to better understand how language teachers understand development and address it in their work, particularly how their program planning and enactment may lay the foundations for learner development. While it is clear that learning develops in complex, contexted and cumulative ways, and cannot simply be attributed to a particular course or teaching and learning program, by gaining insights into how these processes work, we may find ways to more effectively promote development of our learners in line with our interculturally oriented goals for language learning. Exploring how development is understood and addressed in teaching practice is the focus of the next three chapters, starting with a focus on curriculum and program design.

References ACARA. (2011). Shape of the Australian curriculum: Languages. Sydney: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised ed.). New York: Verso. Bennett, J. M., Bennett, M. J., & Allen, W. (2003). Developing intercultural competence in the language classroom. In D. L. Lange & M. Paige (Eds.), Culture as the core: Perspectives on culture in second language learning (pp. 237–270). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Bennett, M. J. (1993). Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R. M. Paige (Ed.), Education for the intercultural experience (pp. 21–72). Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press. Bigelow, M. (2019). Perspectives: (Re)considering the role of emotion in language teaching and learning. The Modern Language Journal, 103, 515– 516.

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

47

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2007). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 793–828). New York: Wiley. Byram, M. (1995). Intercultural competence and mobility in multinational contexts: A European view. In M. L. Tickoo (Ed.), Language and culture in multilingual societies: Viewpoints and visions (pp. 21–36). Singapore: SEAMO Regional Language Centre. Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflections. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (2010). Linguistic and cultural education for Bildung and citizenship. The Modern Language Journal, 94, 317–321. Byram, M. (2014). Twenty-five years on—From cultural studies to intercultural citizenship. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27, 209–225. Byram, M., Golubeva, I., Han, H., & Wagner, M. (2017). From principles to practice in education for intercultural citizenship. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Nichols, A., & Stephens, D. (2001). Developing intercultural competence in practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., & Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 140– 151. Byrd Clark, J. (2020). Reflexivity and criticality for language and intercultural communication research and practice. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 86– 106). New York: Routledge. Byrnes, H., Maxim, H. H., & Norris, J. M. (2010). Realizing advanced foreign language writing development in collegiate education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94(Suppl.), 1–235. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review, 2, 1–28. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities, Review in Research in Education, 24, 249– 306, Sage. Cook, V. J. (1992). Evidence for multicompetence. Language Learning Journal, 42, 557–591. Cook, V. J., & Li Wei. (2016a). The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cook, V. J., & Li Wei (Eds.). (2016b). Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

48

M. KOHLER

Council of Europe. (2018). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment: Companion volume with new descriptors. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Crozet, C., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2000). Teaching culture as an integrated part of language: Implications for the aims, approaches and pedagogies of language teaching. In A. J. Liddicoat & C. Crozet (Eds.), Teaching languages, teaching cultures. Language Australia: Melbourne. de Bot, K., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2011). Researching second language development from a dynamic systems theory perspective. In M. Verspoor, K. de Bot, & W. Lowie (Eds.), A dynamic approach to second language development: Methods and techniques (pp. 5–24). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dervin, F. (2017). “I find it odd that people have to highlight other people’s differences - even when there are none”: Experiential learning and interculturality in teacher education. International Review of Education, 86, 87–102. Dornyei, Z. (2001). Motivation to learn a foreign/second language. In Teaching and researching motivation. Harlow, UK: Longman. Ellis, N. C. (2007). Dynamic systems and SLA: The wood and the trees. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 10(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s1366728906002744. Garcia, O., & Wei, Li. (2015). Translanguaging, bilingualism and bilingual education. In W. E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. García (Eds.), The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (1st ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. Gelman, S., & Kalish, C. (2007). Conceptual development. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 687–733). New York: Wiley. Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education, 5, 93–116. Halliday, M. A. K. (1999). The notion of ‘context’ in language education. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and context in functional linguistics (pp. 1–24). Philadelphia: Benjamins. Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jackson, J. (2014). The process of becoming reflexive and intercultural: Navigating study abroad and reentry experience. In J. Byrd Clark & F. Dervin (Eds.), Reflexivity and multimodality in language education: Rethinking multilingualism and interculturality in accelerating, complex and transnational spaces (pp. 43–53). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Kearney, E. (2016). Intercultural learning in modern language education: Expanding meaning-making potentials. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kohler, M. (2015). Teachers as mediators in the foreign language classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

49

Kohler, M., & Scarino, A. (2018). Attending to diversities through curriculum design: The case of languages in the Australian curriculum. In A. Reid & D. Price (Eds.), The Australian curriculum: Promises, problems, prospects (pp. 115–126). Melbourne: The Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA). Kramsch, C. (1999). Thirdness: The intercultural stance. In T. Vestergaard (Ed.), Language, culture and identity. Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University Press. Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2008). Ecological perspectives on foreign language education. Language Teaching, 41(3), 389–408. Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Kramsch, C. (2014). Teaching foreign languages in an era of globalization: Introduction. The Modern Language Journal, 98, 296–311. Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics Advance Access, 29, 1–27. Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. New York: Oxford University Press. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2015). Saying what we mean: Making a case for ‘language acquisition’ to become ‘language development’. Language Teaching, 48(4), 491–505. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444814000019. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leung, C., & Scarino, A. (2016). Reonceptualizing the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 81–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12300-00267902/16/81-95. Levine, G. S. (2020). A human ecological language pedagogy. Modern Language Journal, 104(Suppl.). Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Liddicoat, A. J., Scarino, A., Papademetre, L., & Kohler, M. (2003). Report on intercultural language learning. Retrieved from Canberra. http://www1.cur riculum.edu.au/nalsas/pdf/intercultural.pdf. McNamara, T. (2019). Language and subjectivity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

50

M. KOHLER

NCSSFL and ACTFL. (2017). NCSSFL-ACTFL can-do statements. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/ncssflactfl-can-do-statements. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. London: Longman. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education. Paavola, S., Lipponen, L., & Hakkarainen, K. (2004). Models of innovative knowledge and three metaphors of learning. Review of Educational Research, 74(4), 557–576. Paige, R. M., Jorstad, H., Siaya, L., Klein, F., & Colby, J. (Eds.). (2003). Culture learning in language education: A review of the literature. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Passarelli, A. M., & Kolb, D. A. (2012). Using experiential learning theory to promote student learning and development in programs of education abroad. In M. Vande Berg, M. Page, & K. Lou (Eds.), Student learning abroad (pp. 137–161). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Porto, M. (2019). Long-term impact of four intercultural citizenship projects in the higher education foreign language classroom. The Language Learning Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2019.1656279. Porto, M., Houghton, S., & Byram, M. (2017). Intercultural citizenship in the (foreign) language classroom. Language Teaching Research (Special Issue), 22, 1–15. Prior, M. T. (2019). Elephants in the room: an ‘affective turn’ or just feeling our way? The Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 516–527. Scarino, A. (2014). Learning as reciprocal, interpretive meaning-making. A view from collaborative research into the professional learning of teachers of languages. The Modern Language Journal (Special Issue), 98(1), 386–401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2014.12068.x. Scarino, A., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2009). Teaching and learning languages: A guide. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation. Scarino, A., Kohler, M., & Benedetti, A. (2014). Investigating pedagogies for language-and-culture learning. Retrieved from Adelaide, South Australia. https://www.decd.sa.gov.au/sites/g/files/net691/f/languages_pedago gies_report_final.pdf?v=1466990807. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27, 4–13. Skehan, P. (1996). A framework for the implementation of task-based instruction. Applied Linguistics, 17 (1), 38–62. Swain, M. (2006). Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Advanced language learning: The

2

WHY A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE MATTERS …

51

contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London and New York: Continuum. Swain, M., Kinnear, P., & Steinman, L. (2015). Sociocultural theory in second language education: An introduction through narratives (2nd ed.). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301. Van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978a). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the Development of Children, 23(3), 34–41. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978b). Mind in society. The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Designing Programs for Developing Intercultural Language Learning

Abstract This chapter provides the first part of the longitudinal case study that forms the main body of the book. The rationale for selecting self-study and the design of the case study including the context and participants are outlined. The discussion traces the planning process from the beginning of profiling the learners, through to conceptualizing and designing the program within a developmental perspective. Particular emphasis is given to concept-based programming and notions of scope and sequence that shape the program and how it attends to development. Keywords Self-study · Longitudinal · Concept-based programming · Learner profiling

In the next three chapters I examine the case of my own practice as a language teacher and how I have conceptualized and enacted my understandings of development in relation to language teaching and learning within an intercultural orientation. The discussion focuses on my own language program for second language learners of Indonesian in an Australian university. My aim is to show, through my case, the conceptualising and planning considerations involved in developing intercultural language learning that might be of value to teachers of languages. The case will be set out according to three key aspects of language teachers’

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_3

53

54

M. KOHLER

work, namely: program design; enacting and mediating, and assessing and evidencing. In this chapter, I consider the first of these aspects, program design, and examine how I set about designing a course of study with specific attention to development of intercultural language learning. The discussion draws upon the ideas outlined in the previous chapter related to human development, and concept-based planning and programming to consider curricula-related notions such as scope and sequence, tasks and learning experiences, and resourcing. A key consideration throughout is how the various dimensions of language learning may be treated in order that they constitute meaningful experiences that provide the conditions for learner development.

The Educational Context Prior to introducing the specific case, it is worth providing some background information to situate the case in Australian higher education more broadly as this may assist in understanding the case itself and also reminds us that our practices, and we ourselves, are contextually influenced. The Australian education system sits within the federation between the Commonwealth (or national) government and the states/territories. At the tertiary level, there are Commonwealth regulatory frameworks that set the standards for accreditation and quality assurance of courses and these are reviewed periodically (typically every five years). Underpinning these systems and processes in all levels of education, is a view that teachers are professionals, who hold the expertise needed to develop high quality teaching and learning programs, and make judgments about learning. Hence, teachers at all levels of education are positioned as curriculum makers and typically design their own teaching and learning programs or do so in collaboration with other teachers. It is within this context that my own practice resides and my own stance as a languages educator has been shaped. I regard myself as a curriculum maker, with the autonomy to develop a teaching and learning program according to my own professional knowledge and judgment, within the relevant regulatory expectations and the university requirements such as those related to hours of instruction and numbers of assignments. In relation to the program content, texts and resources, pedagogical approach and assessments, I have significant freedom to develop these as I see fit. Having said that, there is also a history associated with courses, and in

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

55

conducting my study, I initially had to manage some inherited aspects of the program, that were superseded by an interculturally oriented design for the remainder of the program. The nature of the changes and design decisions will be discussed in more detail later. One last consideration prior to outlining the case under consideration is my own valuing of praxis. From the outset of my career I was drawn to ideas that helped me theorise my practice as a teacher, and this orientation has remained with me as I have moved from secondary school language teaching, to tertiary language teaching and language teacher education. The dichotomizing that often happens between theory and practice can be, in my view, unhelpful and impede efforts in both. For me, the notion of praxis is an appealing and generative one as it brings together theory and practice in a dialectic relationship, each informing and enriched by the other. Often teachers’ experiential or intuitive knowledge is undervalued, as it is not regarded as sufficiently empirical, and conversely, theoretical understandings are often disregarded by teachers as being too abstract or decontextualized to be meaningful (Byram et al., 2013). My own work over many years as a language teacher, teacher educator and applied linguist has required me to mediate amongst various individuals and groups on many levels, drawing on theory to inform practice and vice versa. The case outlined in this chapter represents my attempt to enact my theoretical understandings in practice; in this way it is a lived experience of praxis that may serve to inform both theoretical models and practice related to language teaching and learning within an intercultural orientation.

Design of the Case Study There were a number of reasons underpinning my decision to study my own practice. Firstly, there is the relative logistical ease related to data gathering; it is easy to negotiate dates and class visits with oneself! More importantly, however, is that my experience over many years in working with language teachers has taught me that it can be difficult to conduct a sustained study of their practice due to various interruptions and changes. In addition, in exploring my own case there was more direct access to the reasoning and thinking underpinning the practice, and to follow the arc of teaching and learning over an extended period. The case therefore resembles a kind of self-study that seeks to capture the process that was undertaken and consider what can be learned from it that may be

56

M. KOHLER

valuable for others. Self-study is often associated with explorations of practice within educational contexts as it attempts to analyse one’s own actions in light of theories and empirical studies of similar phenomena, and use the case of one’s own experience to inform future practice and theoretical understandings (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). As one case, self-study does not aim for generalisability but rather aims for an in-depth exploration and explanation of a phenomenon that is not well understood. The self-study that informs this book resides within a qualitative research approach that seeks to make sense of a phenomenon through one’s own experience. The aim was to conduct research that might uncover the practices, experiences and tacit knowledge that teachers hold and enact in their work, as a means to better understand practice in general and contribute experience-and-practice-informed understandings into theory. While self-study privileges the perspective of the researcherpractitioner, there is a sense in which, particularly in educational contexts, the self is never alone. That is, self-study is to some degree self-other study, especially when it involves investigation of teaching practice in which others, at the very least students, are involved. In this kind of study, the researcher-practitioner is the primary investigator and participant, however this is necessarily a relational act, as it occurs in interaction with others, be that directly in the form of students or indirectly such as through texts, technologies, or institutional and ideological influences. The researcher-practitioner is responsible for conducting the study, enacting the practice, and analyzing and communicating the findings, however in doing so, will likely draw on other voices of those involved. In this particular study, the other primary ‘voices’ are those of students who undertook the course, but who also interacted with others beyond the classroom, such as their families, work colleagues and of course the ‘voices’ in the texts studied. Recognising that self-study can be multi-voiced may seem somewhat contradictory, however it reflects the centrality of interaction, the sociocultural nature of teaching and learning, and of the ecological nature of the classroom context. The ‘voices’ of students in this study through their oral and written responses, will aid in exemplifying aspects of practice and enriching the interpretations that I provide as the researcher-practitioner. Finally, self-study is a form of research grounded in the experience of the principal researcher also as a practitioner, recognizing that his/her experience is situated in a particular social, cultural and political context, and that the interpretation of that experience is similarly situated. In

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

57

the study undertaken to inform this book, the researcher was both teacher/practitioner, and researcher/theoretician, both an insider and outsider, moving between these roles at different times. Of course, one of the complexities of self-study and ethnographic style approach is that the ‘self’ is ever-present and there is heightened awareness of subjectivity in both the practices and analyses that are undertaken. It is a research method that is self-aware and foregrounds the situated, the subjective and the interpretive nature of both practice and research. A reasonable course of action for a self-study researcher is thus to acknowledge context and subjectivity, and to include other voices where possible not so much as a means of triangulating but as a means of enriching the data and its interpretation. The intention overall being to yield insights into the tacit knowledge and conceptual framings that underpin practice in order to inform understandings of it for improving one’s own practice, and potentially that of others. The study explored here was designed as a longitudinal case study of a group of fifteen, second language learners of Indonesian in the second year (intermediate level) of a tertiary language program. The data comprised various components—learner profiles, the teaching and learning program, observation notes on mediation, learning and assessments, and student responses including self-reflections. The study was conducted over one academic year and followed my attempts as the language teacher to address the development of intercultural language learning in practice. Longitudinal studies can generate substantial, messy data (Harklau, 2008) and I needed to manage the volume and coding of data, using psuedonyms to store the student responses, and ultimately selecting key artefacts such as the teaching program, culminating reflections, and an indicative sample of assessments and learner responses for discussion. The data were gathered throughout the year and analysed using the processes of document analysis (teaching and learning program and planning documents), thematic analysis (observation of teaching notes), and discourse analysis (student responses). The findings of each were used to develop a number of themes that form the basis of the culminating discussion in Chapter 6. In setting out to investigate teaching practice in relation to developing intercultural language learning, several caveats are needed. Firstly, as noted previously, this is one experience, of one teacher (me), captured, analysed and conveyed by the same person from a research perspective— with all of my own enculturation, situatedness, and subjectivity—it is not

58

M. KOHLER

intended to be generalisable but illustrative and informative. Secondly, language classrooms, curricula and language itself, are ecological in nature, and as such are complex, interrelated and dynamic systems (cf. Van Lier 2000, 2004; Larsen-Freeman 2016). Any attempt to study any of these phenomena is challenging as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and no single aspect can be understood independently. Having recognised this, there is also the conundrum that investigation necessarily involves a starting point and a next point, and to some degree, needs to exclude aspects that are not the primary focus. That is, a study will not be able to capture the totality of an ecological system with all of the interrelationships of its parts—it will have limitations. Furthermore, even if one could capture it all, it would change. Ecological systems are dynamic and thus can only be a snapshot of a particular state at a given moment in time, and of course, our understandings of that snapshot (to return to my first caveat) are formed through our own situatedness at any given moment. With these caveats in mind, I now consider the case of my own practice, starting with my program design, as the basis for the yearlong course at the centre of this study.

Knowing the Learners Why Knowing Learners Matters Given the emphasis placed on learners being at the core of teaching within an intercultural orientation, I set out to find out about who my learners were and what this might mean for their learning and my teaching through the course. Sociocultural theory and constructivist approaches to education have emphasized the learners and their ‘backgrounds’ as the foundation upon which new learning can be developed. This idea has often foregrounded learner ‘background’, understood as learning styles, interests and/or traits. The notion of background can have a sense of something predetermined, static and passive. Within an intercultural orientation what is foregrounded is the notion of lifeworlds (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) which includes learners’ life experiences, discursive practices, linguistic and cultural frameworks and interpretive lenses, desires, affiliations and identities. These are viewed not just as what learners bring to their learning but as constitutive of their resources for learning; recognising that their lifeworlds are dynamic and continually changing through their learning.

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

59

Of particular interest for intercultural language learning are the language/s and culture/s that learners bring from their primary socialization as their foundation for conceptualising, interacting, connecting, reflecting, and expressing their knowing and identity. In Australia, while there is an increasingly diverse population, the majority of learners typically bring English as their first language to schooling and English is the medium of instruction in education. By the time young people reach tertiary education, most of them will have also studied a second/foreign language such as Japanese, Italian, French or Indonesian through schooling. Thus, learners’ linguistic and cultural repertoires for communicating and learning may include at least English, and some limited proficiency in at least one additional language, and for some learners also a background/heritage language. Quite a number of university learners have experiences with other languages and cultures through having travelled overseas, quite often to Indonesia, particularly Bali (as one of the most popular destinations for Australian tourists). All of these experiences come to comprise a learner’s personal linguaculture (Risager, 2012) that will impact on their prior knowledge and ways of knowing, their linguistic and cultural proficiency, how they learn and demonstrate learning, and their hopes, aspirations and dispositions as learners. Knowing the learners in this rich sense, provides a sound foundation for designing a program that is meaningful and appropriately suited to their prior experiences and learning needs. Finding Out About Learners Within this study, I had a number of assumptions about who my learners would be based on my prior teaching experience and knowledge of learners who are typically attracted to learning Indonesian. The nature of the course also influenced who studied it, in that by second year, learners had all either undertaken the first year course or had entered through the advanced stream for learners who had completed high school Indonesian. I also knew that within this cohort there were often a few learners who had travelled to Bali or perhaps Java as part of a holiday or shortcourse experience, and therefore had some prior experience of Indonesian language/s and culture/s. I set about gathering further information to go beyond my assumptions and better inform my understandings. I developed a diagnostic questionnaire as a kind of profiling process, to elicit information about

60

M. KOHLER

learners’ prior experiences, affiliations, desires and aspirations, as well as their conceptual understandings. The questionnaire was conducted in the second week of the course so that I could inform learners about the study and the purpose of the profiling process, such that they felt there was a clear and valid reason for completing it. Figure 3.1 shows the profiling questionnaire and its composition beginning with personal factual information, origins and prior learning experiences, linguistic and cultural resources, goals and aspirations, and concluding with understandings of key concepts. My aim was to start with concrete familiar information, moving through learners’ histories and their goals, and then to more abstract ideas about language and culture that could reveal at least some of their conceptual understandings. Using Profiling Information to Inform Practice The profiling process confirmed a number of my assumptions; that all of the students were second language learners of Indonesian, having some prior learning through having studied first year Indonesian at university. Four students also entered through the advanced level pathway that recognises prior learning; three having studied Indonesian to completion in the final year of secondary school, and one having completed a semester intensive Indonesian language program in Central Java. A further three students had visited Indonesia; one on a two week tour through a university in-country study program focussed on Islam and the Law, and two others through visits to Bali. Hence, there was some prior language learning and in-country experiential learning that I needed to acknowledge, and tap into as a resource for the benefit of the individual learner and the whole class of learners. Apart from their first year of Indonesian, most of the students had limited exposure to learning additional/foreign languages, with students coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds including Law, Education, Chemical Engineering and Public Policy. They generally understood language learning as a process of acquiring linguistic competence and were not familiar with an intercultural orientation and more personalised, interpretive oriented language learning, let alone learning-oriented assessment. There are a number of ways to elicit information about learners to inform a teaching and learning program, such as by profiling questionnaire, conferencing and journals. The key point is to find ways to inform ourselves prior to and during teaching such that our programs and

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

Your responses to the following questions will provide useful information that will assist in understanding your learning needs and in interpreting your work and overall language learning. Please respond as fully as possible and remember that this information will be kept confidential and is only available to me. Name: …………………………………………………… Age: ………………………. Year level: ……………………………….. In which country were you born? …………………………………………… In which language/s was your primary and/or secondary education? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. With which culture/s do you identify? ………………………………………………… Please explain why you identify with this/these culture/s? (e.g. family heritage, migration) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Which language/s do you know and how did you come to know it/them? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Which language/s do you speak regularly? (with whom and where?) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What language/s have you previously studied and for how long? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What is your interest/reason is studying Indonesian (as opposed to other languages)? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What do you feel you know well in Indonesian and what areas do you need to work on? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What impressions/understandings do you have about Indonesia including its language/s and culture/s? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What kinds of sources influence your thinking and impressions of Indonesia? (e.g. family, friends, media, travel, internet…) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. What aspects/understandings would you like to develop about Indonesia including its language/s and culture/s? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Complete the following statement: Language is… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Complete the following statement: Culture is… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Complete the following statement: Language and culture are… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Any other comments:

Fig. 3.1 Student profile questionnaire

61

62

M. KOHLER

teaching are meaningful for learners in relation to their lifeworlds. That is, processes such as profiling questionnaires are only a starting point, and teachers are continually adding to and adjusting their understandings of learners as the program is enacted. To a certain degree teachers need to make some general assumptions in designing teaching and learning programs, however we can enhance this work through processes that inform us about learners and their learning. Having rich information about learners enables us to create opportunities to connect with their lifeworlds, previous learning, and their interpretive frames that will support their development. Our selection of content, as well as the experiences and interactions related to it, become crucial in creating affordances for personalisation that are vital to an intercultural orientation.

Designing the Teaching and Learning Program The information provided through diagnostic processes such as learner profiling is valuable in informing teaching practice, particularly in shaping the affordances for learning that are embedded within courses and teaching and learning programs. In this section I outline how the course for these language learners was designed, and in particular how this influenced the teaching and learning program in ways that provided for development of students’ intercultural language learning. I start by explaining the course aims and then discuss two key considerations related to program design; scoping and sequencing. Each of these will be considered in some detail in order to show how they contribute to preparing a foundation for developing learners’ intercultural language learning. Prior to outlining the program and my rationale for it, it is important to consider the nature of planning and programming, its benefits and limitations. Firstly, programs are statements about intentions for teaching and learning that represent a ‘best guess’ attempt to plan a course that will enable learning to occur. They are temporally situated, statements made at a given point in time with the information available, and they are projections of what might be, not what will be; that is, they are the planned not the lived curriculum. Furthermore, when considering development in learning, programs can act as a valuable roadmap for considering potential connections that can be made in the actual experience of teaching and learning. A program in this sense is less of a map of the territory to be covered in order to arrive at a certain destination, and more of a series of signposts and options for the journey one might create for oneself.

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

63

Thus, a program represents a series of connected ideas and experiences that are intended to unfold over time, and when taken together can act as a backbone for development. Without a program, there is a risk that episodes may be discrete from one another or become disjointed, and therefore be too random and unstable as a base for building connections in learning over time. Of course university courses and programs are constrained by time in a linear sense such as the numbers of weeks per semester, however without some sense of linearity, there is little attention to the cumulative effect of experiences over time and learning could become quite serendipitous. For intercultural language learning, there needs to be a balance between providing some parameters and direction for learning while remaining flexible enough to be responsive to learners, the learning context and interaction. Aims, Goals and Objectives The Intermediate Indonesian course is situated within a three-year major in Indonesian, and is typically undertaken as the second year of a beginner entry pathway, or the first year of a continuer entry pathway (that is, for those with some prior learning). Hence, it is not the first exposure to Indonesian language and culture, and as the course title suggests, it assumes learners’ proficiency is beyond elementary level. The orientation in many language courses in universities, and often in Asian languages given the history of their place in Australian education (cf. Kohler & Mahnken 2010; Lo Bianco & Slaughter 2009), is towards communicative language use, heavily geared towards learning functional and transactional language. For Indonesian, given its proximity to Australia, there has been a long-standing assumption that language learning for tertiary language learners will be relevant for travel, further study and possibly work in Indonesia, and students, other lecturers and university administrators largely expect this. Against this backdrop, I aimed to reorient the existing Intermediate Indonesian program retaining a focus on communicative goals while moving towards an intercultural orientation. My goals needed to resemble what students were accustomed to and expected, while introducing and establishing an intercultural orientation. The goals as stated in the existing university course information were: In this program, learners will:

64

M. KOHLER

• use Indonesian orally and in writing to inform, and interact with, peers and Indonesian speaker/s • explore contemporary aspects of Indonesian language, society and culture as evident in a range of texts • develop bilingual/bicultural resources that mediate languages and cultures • analyse and apply understanding of a range of grammatical structures and textual features • develop a critical and reflective intercultural perspective. This set of goals while familiar also represented a departure from the kind of orientation that learners had experienced either in their first year of the course or in their school language program, and I knew would require some socialisation with learners at the start and during the program (as I explain in Chapter 4). My goals were underpinned by three facets of language learning within an intercultural orientation, that is: • participation in performance and experience of communication, • analysis of aspects of language and culture involved in communication, • reflection on the comparative, interlinguistic and intracultural dimensions of language learning and language use (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). These facets are suggestive of the processes that learners might engage in through their learning as well as the subject positions that are available to them. That is, the processes align with various roles and positions for learners: as participants in the target language community—as learners and users of the target language; as analysts of the target language and culture—learning about it, understanding these are interrelated meaning systems; and as reflective language learners and users, developing understandings of the nature of what it means to exchange meanings with others across languages and cultures. These facets enabled me to consider the program goals in relation to learning processes as well as the roles learners would be invited to take; it prompted the question of who learners can and might want to be as a result of my program. I wanted learners to adopt a range of roles and subject positions to enable them to consider how these might ‘fit’ or not with their sense of self. I considered

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

65

that Intermediate learners of Indonesian were beyond outsider-observer roles and were closer to participants who were emerging as intercultural mediators. Thus, my goals comprised knowledge, skills, understandings, and perspectives that would enable learners to interact, mediate, and develop greater awareness of themselves as communicators, and of the process of meaning making. Goals provide the macro intentions of a program, and these need to be realised through a set of more specific intentions or learning objectives. The goals were subsequently developed as a number of objectives related to each of the units, providing greater specificity at the level more closely related to teaching and learning (see Table 3.1). The objectives were developed with reference to the dimensions of language learning outlined in the Australian Curriculum: Languages (see Chapter 2). This ensured that a range of domains of language use, reflection and the development of meta-understandings of language and culture, would be included across the program. Intermediate Indonesian Program Context and Learners This program is designed for a class of learners of Indonesian, the majority of who have studied Indonesian at the tertiary level for one year prior to this course. A small number of students have entered the program directly from having studied Year 12 Indonesian, following 5 years of secondary school language learning. These students typically have sound foundations of both grammatical knowledge and range of vocabulary, as well as strategies for learning how to learn Indonesian. Students entering this program after one year of tertiary typically require some revision and strengthening of foundational grammatical forms and rules, as well as increased exposure to vocabulary, and language structures and texts for increasingly complex and public contexts. Students have a range of motivations for learning Indonesian; some purely for self-interest, some to become teachers, and some as a value-add to other professional degrees such as developmental studies, law and social policy, and health. Hence, students come with various prior knowledge, discipline interests, desires and aspirations—almost all are curious about Indonesia, with many having had brief experience of visiting or having friends or family based there.

66

M. KOHLER

Program Purpose and Broad Goals This program is designed to strengthen the foundational understanding and use of Indonesian for engaging in interpersonal relationships, informational contexts and aesthetic purposes. The course develops students’ knowledge of the system of standard Indonesian including raising awareness of register, and extending the range of contexts of language use to more public, societal and aesthetic contexts. The course also includes a focus on using Indonesian to expand students’ knowledge of Indonesia through a content-and-language integrated approach in the latter units. Students develop a range of language and knowledge of text types related, for example, to geography, history and faith. The course aims to develop students’ awareness of themselves as bi-/multilingual and intercultural language learners, learning how to mediate across at least two languages and cultures, Indonesian and their own, and learning ways to make meaning for themselves and for, and with, others. In particular the course includes a focus on developing translation capabilities, not only in terms of coding processes but in terms of processes for expressing and interpreting meaning across languages and cultures. Students participate in translating, explain the processes involved, and reflect on their experience, and in doing so, consider how meaning ‘travels’ (or not) across languages and cultures. That is, students are learning about the nature of communication and exchanging meanings. Students are encouraged to develop a reflective mindset throughout the course, noticing how they react to language, how they use language to impact on others, that is, understanding the symbolic power of language in interaction across languages and cultures. In doing so, they are asked to consider their own subject positions, what they bring to learning Indonesian, how they might be seen by others, how their identity may influence their interactions with others. They then reflect on what this means for who they are becoming through their learning of Indonesian.

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

67

Scoping the Program Once I had formulated my goals, I needed to consider the matter of content; the ingredients that would form the substance of the program to be taught and learned, and become the basis for development over time. My starting point was to put the learners and their lifeworlds at the centre of my thinking, as a reference point for subsequent design decisions. I then needed to consider what elements would feature in the program, and how these would provide scope for development over time. I developed a diagram (see Fig. 3.2) to represent my understanding of the relationship between key aspects of intercultural language learning, and human development, as outlined in the bioecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007). This diagram is not intended as a fully theorised model but rather it acted as a heuristic device for me in designing the program. The learners and their lifeworlds, including their knowledges and experiences, characteristics and dispositions (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007), desires and affiliations are located at the centre. The circles represent the ‘content’ dimensions through which new ideas, information, experiences are presented to learners. There are three interrelated dimensions: concepts, language, and experiences. The intersections indicate that no single dimension can operate on its own; concepts are ways of integrating and organizing experience; experiences inform our thinking and abstracted understandings of the world; and both concepts and experiences are made, interpreted, internalised, expressed and shared through language. Since concepts are a means through which we organise experience and our understandings of the world, they are particularly useful for planning the content of the learning. Rather than prioritise language and/or culture only as a starting point, concepts provide a means through which both can be considered in an integrated way. Furthermore, in terms of development, concepts are open to interpretation, and can also be considered at increasingly more abstract levels. This is particularly beneficial for building connections in learning, to existing conceptual frameworks as well as to different interpretations in relation to concepts that develop over time. The language dimension brings together texts and contexts of language use (micro contexts) that represent manifestations of ideas and experiences. All of these dimensions are interrelated and reside within a dynamic, macro context of social, historical, political and cultural influences. Finally, in order to consider development, there

Understanding • Language (systems of language inc. grammar, vocabulary, text types, textual knowledge, discourse, metalinguistic awareness) • Language variation and change • Reflecting on role of language and culture

Objectives: Students learn… Communicating • Socialising/Interpersonal • Informing/Informational • Creating/Aesthetic • Translating/Mediating • Reflecting on Intercultural language use

Overarching concept—Adjustment Masa kecil (childhood) & Perspektif (perspective) Agama (faith, religion) Kenangan (memory) Overarching goal—developing a multilingual and intercultural capability, becoming an intercultural mediator To develop knowledge about diverse faiths To express opinions about social To establish and maintain relationships and religions, in Indonesia and globally issues and their impact on people’s with Indonesian peers (through email) To interact with Indonesian guides, with lives To share memorable childhood support, to learn about Islam and To develop skills in analyzing texts experiences, such as starting school or experience life in a mosque in the local for gist and cultural meanings being ill To develop translating and mediating community To develop language for discussing To recount intercultural experiences and skills language, culture and language learning critically reflect on own reactions and To develop awareness of diverse as an intercultural experience perspectives, and own assumptions in situatedness engaging with social issues Textual knowledge—Articles/Informational Textual knowledge—Correspondence Textual knowledge—Biography/Personal Discussion/Interpersonal (Letter)/Interpersonal Correspondence (Email)/Interpersonal Questioning e.g. Sudah pernah…? Describing actions—transitive verbs Referring to people—pronoun system Mengapa/kenapa? Sudah berapa lama…? (me-kan, me-i) Creating cohesion—conjunctions (jadi, Bagaimana? Distancing self from action—3rd supaya, untuk) Comparing e.g. jauh lebih…, person passive construction Describing actions—verbs (me-, me-kan) lebih…daripada…, dibandingkan Expressing opinions (pada Describing qualities—adjective (me-kan) dengan…, Referring to the past—tense (Pada suatu pihak/pendapat, Describing actions—complex verbs kurang…, terlalu…) hari…, Waktu dia kecil…) MemperGiving advice (menyarankan, Giving reasons/justifying a view e.g. mengusulkan supaya) To become attuned to the role of karena, sebenarnya, Walaupun… language and culture in intercultural sebaiknya… To develop awareness of how exchange, particularly socializing with meaning works, and extend peers metalanguage for explaining language To understand how cultural values and practices influence language use and choices identity

Concepts

Module 3 (week 9–12)

Module 1 (week 1–4)

Year overview

Module 2 (weeks 5–8)

The teaching and learning program—Intermediate Indonesian

Intermediate Indonesian—Year overview

Table 3.1

68 M. KOHLER

Assessment processes

(continued)

Across the program: Contexts change from personal/individual, to interpersonal, to public regional/national, to inter-national, group and return to self/individual Processes change from description/analysis, to comparison/relating, to reflection (self), critical comparison/evaluation, to meta-reflection (self in relation to other) Jigsaw activity to discuss articles about Analysis of texts about social issues Recount/conversation about school diverse faiths and belief systems e.g. poverty, colonialism, polygamy days/childhood memories Analysis of articles—Islamic practice of Discuss short story about Analysis of film poster mudik (homecoming) poverty/inequality Listen to film theme song lyrics, Discuss and compare faith related Exchange opinions about issues e.g. predicting meanings/themes language, proverbs and expressions cultural norms of beauty/self-image Review film (Laskar Pelangi)—create Describe an object/artifact and its Read, translate and respond to text, synopsis and critical analysis spiritual/personal significance explaining language choices and Exchange emails with Indonesian peer Prepare questions for visit reactions to mosque, participate and debrief about the experience Email-self-introduction Translating, mediating and explaining Recount of visit to mosque

Module 3 (week 9–12)

Experiences

Module 2 (weeks 5–8)

Module 1 (week 1–4)

Year overview

Intermediate Indonesian—Year overview

3 DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

69

(continued)

Understanding • Language (systems of language inc. grammar, vocabulary, text types, textual knowledge, discourse, metalinguistic awareness) • Language variation and change • Reflecting on role of language and culture

Objectives: Students learn… Communicating • Socialising/Interpersonal • Informing/Informational • Creating/Aesthetic • Translating/Mediating • Reflecting on Intercultural language use

Overarching concept—Adjustment Alam (nature)

Concepts

Module 5 (weeks 5–8)

Module 6 (week 9–12)

Sejarah dan filsafat (history and Menyesuaikan diri philosophy) (fitting in/adjusting) Overarching goal—developing a multilingual and intercultural capability, becoming an intercultural mediator To critically analyse persuasive texts, To extend knowledge about, and To develop knowledge about the make connections between, Indonesian noting how language works to natural world and environments of influence others and Australian history Indonesia and Australia To critically reflect on texts conveying To demonstrate a set of instructions To analyse and synthesise diverse that relate to an aspect of life in national values, ideology and identity perspectives about events and their Australia/own lifeworld To initiate and sustain an interaction impact on communities To apply understandings of with a member of the local To debate diverse views on nature Indonesian community, exploring their experience of ‘fitting in’ in creating and man’s relationship to it a resource for an Indonesian experiences in adjusting to a new To investigate and share knowledge perspective, with focus on language about an aspect of the natural world culture and culture To extend strategies for managing of interest To reflect on experience of interaction, and reflect on the experience of interacting independently intercultural mediation, and own language learning and identity development Textual knowledge—Various Textual Textual knowledge—Declarative/Informational persuasive/Informational and knowledge—Articles/Informational Interpersonal texts e.g. Proclamation, national Nominalising—abstract nouns pe-an, blog/pamplet/video anthems—aesthetic ke-an Giving instructions—imperatives Expressing sequence of events in Justifying—conjunctions e.g. Distancing self from action—1st, time—markers e.g. dulu, pada walaupun demikian, sehingga… 2nd person passive construction abad/zaman dahulu,—an Describing states—superlatives terTo understand language Asking complex questions e.g. prefix variability—register e.g. colloquial Siapakah…? Yang mana? Pernahkah? Creating forms and expressions e.g. drop To understand impact of mode on cohesion—conjunctions—namun, prefixes, idioms variability of langage—written and baik..maupun…, Walaupun To reflect on process of mediating spoken forms demikian…, Sebenarnya…, Lagipula That language and culture shape and To reflect on the influence of national meanings across cultures and its and personal histories on intercultural impact on sense of identity reflect knowledge and perspectives experience and the process of about the natural world adjusting

Module 4 (week 1–4)

Year overview

Intermediate Indonesian—Year overview

Table 3.1

70 M. KOHLER

Assessment processes

Across the program: Contexts change from personal/individual, to interpersonal, to public regional/national, to inter-national, group and return to self/individual Processes change from description/analysis, to comparison/relating, to reflection (self), critical comparison/evaluation, to meta-reflection (self in relation to other) Listen to anthems and compare values Share experiences of interviews with Discuss images of landscapes members of Indonesian community and ideologies—Indonesia Raya, Analysis of texts about natural Advance Australia Fair, Raya Indonesia Critically analyse online government events/disasters and community resources advising Analysis of Pancasila, the state Listen to news reports-volcanic Indonesians about life in Australia philosophy eruptions Prepare an instructional video/oral Debate—the pros and cons of nature Discuss timelines of major historical presentation about an aspect of life events in Indonesia and Australia, Prepare an oral presentation about in Australia e.g. lifestyle, pastimes, discuss influences of national identity an aspect of the natural world that fashion, cuisine (and relevance to individuals) interests you Create a mediating artifact, and Prepare questions to conduct share with class. Evaluate learning interview with member of local program and its impact Indonesian community Oral presentation about natural Ethnographic interview Bilingual/bicultural resource and world reflection

Module 6 (week 9–12)

Experiences

Module 5 (weeks 5–8)

Module 4 (week 1–4)

Year overview

Intermediate Indonesian—Year overview

3 DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

71

72

M. KOHLER

Fig. 3.2 Considerations in designing programs for intercultural language learning

must be attention to time, and this diagram indicates that all dimensions reside within a temporal reality that is dynamic and ever evolving. Each ‘cluster’, of concepts, language and experiences, occurs in the present and becomes the ‘prior’ or past learning upon which the next cluster and new learning can be based. The cumulative effect of these clusters over time constitutes the teaching and learning program that acts as a launching pad for development. Concepts Having adopted a concept-based approach to planning, I needed to identify which concepts to be included. Selecting concepts is a somewhat arbitrary process in that there is no prioritised set or predetermined sequence, as concepts are primarily related to existing concepts and experience. There are also different kinds of concepts to consider including

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

73

concepts that are linguistic in nature (e.g. nominalisation) as well as those that related to specific disciplines (e.g. time, community, health, equality). There are also concepts that are particularly meaningful as a window on how a given culture may frame experience/s in the world. These concepts are often reflected in the target language such as through particular words or expressions, for example, in French fraternité; in German Schádenfreude; in Italian la bella figura, in Chinese fu; in Japanese uchi-soto, and so on. There are many such concepts in Indonesian, including those that I considered essential for Intermediate learners to grasp in order to ‘get inside’ the worldview embedded in the language. I asked myself what the key ideas, sensibilities, and worldviews are that feature prominently in Indonesian language/s and culture/s that learners need to understand and internalise in order to operate within Indonesian and across both it and their own language/s and culture/s. In selecting the concepts to include in the program, I also returned to what I knew about my learners. I started with their conceptual frameworks, developed through their socialisation in Australia (for the majority) through Australian-English. I considered concepts that learners would need to develop in order to bridge their existing knowledge frameworks to those embedded within Indonesian. In line with my interest in development, I considered where students were at, and the overall kind of learning that would be meaningful to them. This led me to an overarching concept of ‘fitting in/adaptation/adjustment’ under which more specific concepts could be located and explored. I then set about identifying the set of contributory concepts, starting with the most pervasive and dominant concepts that shape Indonesian, at least from my experience as a second language learner and teacher of Indonesian. Typically, one of the most challenging and confronting aspects of learning Indonesian is the influence of faith and religion in the language(s) and culture(s) of Indonesia. For many young Australians, the concept of ‘faith’ is not an overt or prominent feature, and in fact, it is often somewhat taboo due to the separation of powers and the secular nature of public education. Yet, understanding agama, its origins, nature, influence, and symbolic value, is crucial to understanding Indonesian language and culture. In addition, the concept of the Pancasila or the state philosophy or ideology, underpins the rule of law, government institutions, societal organization, cultural practices, and education. I therefore chose a suite of concepts including general concepts (childhood memories and perspective) and domain specific concepts related to geography, history and philosophy, in

74

M. KOHLER

order to expand learners’ general and cultural knowledge. These concepts became the organizing frames for the series of short-term units within each semester (see Table 3.1), and the basis for identifying the nature and level of linguistic content. Language Concepts can be thought of as abstracted ideas relating to different domains of human knowledge. They are integrally related to language in that language acts as the vehicle through which concepts are formed, learned and communicated. In designing a program, there is a need to consider how concepts are manifested in and through language such that they can be taught and learned, that is, how can concepts become teachable content. In my own planning, I think of this process as a kind of ‘grounding’ in which texts, ranging from single words or phrases to particular genres or discourses, related to particular ideas are identified. Texts are then the vehicle through which concepts, language and culture, are explored in classroom interaction. In designing the program, I carefully selected a series of texts on the basis of both concepts and linguistic content such as grammar and vocabulary, and that were at a level that was appropriate for the learners. It can be challenging to source texts that are linguistically within the reach of learners, in my case at an intermediate level, and sufficiently rich conceptually such that learners can manage the linguistic demands and find the ideas engaging. There is also a need to distinguish between texts used to stimulate discussion and interaction (pedagogical focus) and those used for focused teaching of linguistic and textual knowledge (content focus). While the same texts can be used for both purposes, there are times when texts are the main focus of learning, and other times when they are prompts for interaction. Here I am describing only those that I included as explicit ‘content’. The key texts consisted of a biography, email, online newspaper articles, conversation/discussion, historical/government documents—proclamation/national anthems, pamphlet/blog/video. As a set, these texts provided a rich range of language in relation to text types, domains of language use (personal/interpersonal, informational, aesthetic, translation/mediation) and genres e.g. biographical, interpersonal, informational, and persuasive. Given the marked difference between spoken and written, and informal and formal Indonesian, the set of texts was also designed to provide some stability through the more formal and written

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

75

forms, while increasingly exposing learners to informal, spoken language. Hence, the texts became more complex over time; in terms of conceptual content, grammatical and linguistic content, particularly register. The intention was to build up, over time, learners’ understandings of register, and develop their capacity to apply this in their own language use. Each text encompassed linguistic knowledge—grammatical, lexical and textual, that could be explored simultaneously with the ideational content. That is, linguistic content did not drive the choice of texts but rather both the concepts and texts associated with them need to be considered together for their suitability for the program at each point, both in terms of their nature and their level of complexity. There was one further consideration in the selection of texts and that was authenticity. Often this is taken to mean a focus on ‘real’ language use, however my concern was with the kinds of representations offered by the texts not just linguistically but also culturally. I wanted to include texts that were created for the target language community as these are imbued with cultural discourses, values, perspectives, practices and ideologies. The key texts were drawn from a range of domains including public documents, literature, correspondence, and narratives from members of the Indonesian community. I also sourced texts from colleagues, who (knowing the purpose) prepared texts that were not readily available otherwise, such as those related to sensitive issues and personal experiences (e.g. polygamy). The inclusion of such texts enabled me to design interactions and learning experiences that encouraged learners to engage with and adopt diverse perspectives about ideas, beliefs and issues, and develop their critical intercultural awareness. Experiences The notion of ‘experience’ brings together a number of aspects crucial for development, including the conceptual, linguistic and processial dimensions of intercultural language learning. Experiences are closely tied with proximal processes and contexts (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007) that shape how people interact in the world, as well as who they interact with, and what roles and relationships they have. Given this, I included a range of experiences that required learners to engage in various processes, roles, and contexts. Learners were asked to take on three main roles: as participants, analysers, and reflective language learners and users (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). In order to do this, they needed opportunities to interact with others that enabled them to

76

M. KOHLER

assume different subject positions as part of developing their awareness of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in intercultural encounters. This meant that I needed to design opportunities in which learners could reflect on their experiences, roles and language use, and consider the impact of this on themselves and on others. As was the case with concepts and language, the experiential dimension needed to take into account micro and macro levels, with some processes relating to particular units and learning tasks/experiences, and other processes relating to the program as a whole. The more substantive experiences included introducing oneself to an Indonesian peer; translating and responding to a letter about a social issue; visiting a mosque in the local community; conducting an ethnographic interview with a member of the Australia-Indonesian community; and creating a mediating artifact for Indonesians coming to live in Australia. In each of these, learners took on different roles and subject positions, ranging from being themselves in the self-introduction, to being a translator, an ethnographer/interviewer, a visitor, and an intercultural mediator and reflective language learner in the culminating unit. Each of the major learning experiences was designed to enable learners to use language in increasingly complex ways that explored increasingly complex concepts. The experiences were often multifaceted in order to capture different aspects of language use (participation), languageand-culture knowledge (analysis), and understanding of self and other in communicating across languages and cultures (reflection/reflexivity). A number of the experiences comprised two parts: a communicative encounter of some kind e.g. prepare questions for a discussion at the mosque; and a reflective component e.g. reflect on your experience at the mosque and share your observations and reactions. The process of reflection was a means of inviting learners to consider the connections between the conceptual focus, their language learning and use, and their intercultural and intracultural awareness. The process of reflecting was intentionally open-ended in order to encourage learners to choose what was most meaningful to them, and to decentre from their immediate experience and try to understand it, and themselves within it, at a more abstract level. For example, the instructions for the self-introduction were as follows: During the semester, you will complete a series of (email) exchanges with an Indonesian peer about a range of topics of interest (to be negotiated). There are two components:

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

77

– A self -introduction (based on a series of images or photos e.g. family, pastimes, study, work) – An example (of your choice) of an interaction (in Indonesian) with an explanation (approx. 250 words in English) of why you choose the example and what it shows about your language use and the experience of intercultural exchange. Taken together, the experiences, conceptual and linguistic foci, comprised the scope of the program with each building on the previous cluster, and becoming more sophisticated and demanding over time. This takes us to the matter of sequencing, and the way that a teaching and learning program can be designed to enable the kinds of connections that are crucial for developing intercultural language learning. Sequencing the Program Planning a teaching and learning program that attends to multiple dimensions and how they relate and travel over time, is akin to creating an ecological system. There is a need to consider a number of elements that operate at different layers, and interconnect in complex and dynamic ways; all of which change and can lead to growth over time. Sequencing is the process that attends to the order in which content, teaching and learning are presented within a program, and how aspects of the program are related in time. The relational dimension means that thought needs to be given to connections that allow for progress in learning over the course. Connections can be of various kinds and occur at different layers within the program (as well as across programs—past, present and future), providing greater coherence that can assist learners to make multiple connections in their own learning (Kohler, 2003; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Within a long-term program, connections at the macro level can be made through mechanisms such as concepts, themes, or tasks. In my yearlong program, I employed both an overarching concept and a culminating experience/task. Together these mechanisms provided direction and connection points for the shorter-term units, each with their cluster of concepts, language and experiences. Each of these aspects was considered in terms of its particular sequence across the program, and how it related to other aspects, until there was a meaningful alignment in each cluster that formed a short-term unit. This reflects the fact that there are multiple layers, macro, meso and micro, and time scales when planning and programming, and these need to ‘connect through’ to each other in

78

M. KOHLER

order to create a coherent program. Figure 3.3 is an attempt to illustrate this interrelatedness of the layers of programming over time. Concepts In the program for Indonesian, the sequence of the units was designed to equip learners with the conceptual, linguistic and experiential knowledge necessary to move from their immediate world, with minimal knowledge and engagement with the Indonesian community to a world of increased knowledge and participation where they could act as intermediaries. To do this, they needed to expand their knowledge of Indonesia, develop linguistic knowledge to participate in exchanges with Indonesian speakers, and to understand the process of communicating across languages and cultures. The initial units were focused on personal and social domains of knowledge, with later units focused on disciplinary domains such as geography, history and religion. The concepts were sequenced in order to build on each other, taking into account what had come before, and what would be needed next. The program began with the concept of ‘Childhood and memory’ as this drew on learners’ existing, experiential knowledge. In this case, the concept acted more as a contextual envelope than a substantive new idea or perspective. The next concept, ‘Perspective’, was intended to develop learners’ awareness and understanding of the idea of ‘situatedness’. The concept was introduced early on in order for learners to understand it and bring it to bear in their future encounters. With this in mind, the next idea of ‘ Faith’ was designed to introduce an idea that is prominent in Indonesia, but also one that receives little attention in Australia. It was necessary to introduce ‘faith’ at this point in the program in order to demystify it and encourage learners to be more knowledgeable about it before conducting their interview with an Indonesian. The two concepts that followed, ‘Nature’ and ‘History and philosophy’ were designed to expand learners’ general knowledge about Indonesia, and their own language and culture, including factual knowledge about geographical features, historical events, values and ideologies. This was intended to give learners an informed basis from which they could compare, and critically appraise diverse perspectives on environmental, social, historical and political matters such as nationalism. The final concept of ‘Fitting in’ had in fact been present throughout as a kind of overarching concept to which all others were attached. This concept was a more ephemeral one in that it really posed a challenge to learners to consider how they would

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

Fig. 3.3 Interrelated layers of programming over time

79

80

M. KOHLER

respond to the idea of ‘adjustment’ and even acculturation that occurs through intercultural experience. Thus, the concepts varied in nature and in their contribution to learners’ development across the program: some represented general knowledge, others were concepts for understanding interculturality, others were domain specific content, and the final one was a culminating idea for applying the learning from the program as a whole. The concepts represented a connected series of ideas designed to expand learners’ knowledge, and their conceptual tools for understanding and participating in intercultural experiences. Language Across the span of units (typically 4–6 weeks each), the language content was sequenced primarily through consideration of grammar structures and text types. While the linguistic content did not ‘drive’ the sequence of units as such, it was important to build on learners’ existing repertoire of Indonesian, and continue to develop their knowledge and understanding of the grammatical system, the range of vocabulary and their textual knowledge. Typically learners come into the intermediate level with knowledge of simple sentence construction (subject, verb, object), a range of common pronouns, simple verb forms typically single word forms (e.g. suka[like], naik[ride]), ber- forms (e.g. berlari [run], bermain [play]) and me- forms (e.g. membaca[read], menonton[watch]). The latter of these is part of a more complex me-verb system that becomes essential for dealing with more abstract ideas and information, especially in public texts. Hence, across the program the me- verb system was developed (e.g. me-kan, me-i, memper-) and texts were chosen that related to the concepts but that also had a strong presence of these linguistic features. This consideration was given also to the pronoun system and the use of passive voice, that is a hallmark of more sophisticated expression in Indonesian, with these linguistic threads sown across the program. In line with a discourse and meaning based view of language, the linguistic content was presented in the context of a text. While not the principal determinant of the scope and sequence as used by Byrnes et al. (2010), I carefully chose texts in relation to their conceptual content, the familiarity of the text type for learners, and the complexity of linguistic structures and features. At times, the conceptual content was particularly worthwhile but the level of language was too difficult for learners hence I modified the texts to retain the conceptual content as much as possible and render the language suitable for the proficiency level of

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

81

learners. For example, the texts related to faith and religion, were conceptually appropriate for learners but linguistically beyond their current level. I modified the texts by simplifying some of the grammatical constructions, removing extraneous details or low frequency and highly technical language, and reducing the overall length (one page each). In this way, the texts still offered interesting information and ideas, while being linguistically manageable for learners. I also considered the processing demands of the texts, starting with more familiar contexts and content, such as the self-introduction, and moving to less familiar contexts and content, such as the national anthems. Each unit offered texts for reception and interaction, and for production and self-expression, and each of these episodes informed me about learners’ linguistic and textual knowledge, and about them. For example, the self-introduction enabled me to elicit information about learners, such as their relationship, interests, pastimes, and aspirations. The letter, moving into more formal register through written interpersonal mode, invited learners to express opinions and give advice in ways that were linguistically challenging, and that revealed more about who they were and what they valued. The sequence of texts, therefore, provided increasingly complex demands in terms of language content, contexts of language use, textual knowledge, and opportunities for learners to interact and express themselves. Experiences The experiential dimension is integral in unifying all aspects of the program, as learners ‘travel’, live and learn through experiences across the program. As with the other dimensions, experiences operate at different levels, occurring in a micro instant of an exchange in a lesson, across a series of lessons within a unit, across a series of units, and across the year as a whole. Thus, planning needs to consider how each experience might relate to the previous and the subsequent ones. It is not possible in the scope of this book to show the fullness of planning at every level that needs to and did in fact occur for the Intermediate Indonesian program. Rather, the overview provides the sequence of key experiences at the macro level that informed detailed planning at the unit and lesson levels. The key experiences were principally designed to develop learners’ capability to interact in increasingly wider contexts and roles, culminating in the role of intercultural mediator. With this in mind, the experiences had to be planned in relation to learners’ previous experiences that were primarily classroom-based interactions, involving learner and

82

M. KOHLER

text, learner and learner, and learner and teacher. The experiences in this program needed to move learners out of the classroom to communitybased contexts in which they could interact with Indonesians, not as a complete immersion but with high levels of support. The experiences were planned as a connected, recursive path of learning, with each one building on the previous one, and leading towards the final, culminating experience. The experiences were imbued with increasing demands such as: a new concept, perspective, subject position or context, new grammar or text type, a new type or extension of a processing or mediating skill, a more abstract or sophisticated understanding, or a combination of these. Table 3.2 shows an attempt to render the set of experiences and how they become increasingly demanding over time. At the start of the program, learners were asked to complete a questionnaire related to their linguistic and cultural biography (as discussed earlier). Next, learners needed to consider their personal biography and historicity, their intracultural selves, as they established an email exchange with an Indonesian peer in a form of intercultural interaction. The next experience was a more complex email, relating to the issue of polygamy, as presented through a personal text. The experience built on the previous one by increasing the language complexity, and also introducing a social issue that was unfamiliar to most learners. By reading and responding to the email, learners had to consider the perspective of the ‘other’ in relation to their own views and assumptions about the issue. This experience laid the groundwork for the experiences in later units, in which learners’ developed knowledge about diverse faiths in Indonesia, which then lead to their preparation of a range of questions to ask during their visit to the mosque. For most learners, this was their first experience of entering a mosque, and some were unaware that it existed in their own community. Moving from this experience of a group visit with teacher support, learners strengthened their capability to sustain an interaction through a debate related to natural events, in both Indonesia and Australia. The Alam (Nature) unit represented an opportunity to acquire content related language that would be useful for their next experience of conducting an ethnographic interview with an Indonesian. In the interview, learners were to gather information about the lives and impressions of Indonesians living in Australia—particularly with a focus on what they needed to learn to ‘fit in’. This experience was crucial in that it prepared the ground also for the final experience. Learners were asked to record the interviews, transcribe an interesting segment and explain why they had chosen this

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

83

Table 3.2 Overview of experiences and learning demands Key interactions/experiences

Rationale and complexification

Linguistic and cultural profile/biography

Reflection on prior experience, developing awareness of intracultural identity Awareness of own understandings of language and culture Develop metalanguage and skills for self-reflection/decentring Making connections Explaining and justifying opinions Noticing reactions and comparing multiple perspectives Juxtaposing ideas/experiences and interpretations Developing language for socialising, establishing and maintaining interaction Mediation of familiar information with peer in low stakes/written context Building language and culture knowledge Developing analytic skills Interpreting meaning and noticing how meaning works across languages and cultures Developing translation/mediation skills, decision making and explaining meaning for others Awareness of diverse perspectives, own assumptions and situatedness, developing criticality and self-awareness Building language and culture knowledge Supported (group) interaction in community context Reflection on self as go-between, intercultural adjustment of others Independent interaction with individual member of local community Reflection on histories, identity and process of adjusting Reflection on self as communicator/participant

(On-going) Class interaction and discussion

Self-introduction

Text analysis

Translating, mediating and explaining (think-aloud) Plus, reflective journal/notes

Excursion/interaction Plus, reflective journal/notes

Ethnographic/interview and reflection on exchange Plus, reflective journal/notes

(continued)

84

M. KOHLER

Table 3.2 (continued) Key interactions/experiences

Rationale and complexification

Oral presentation

Building language and culture knowledge Develop skills in independent research and synthesizing information to present to others Critical analysis skills—language and culture, diverse perspectives, values and ideology Consider variability of language and culture Critical analysis of own language and culture Mediation skills, recognising alternative perspectives Cumulative, meta-abstraction and connections across prior experiences Reflection and reflexivity about intracultural identity, and self as intercultural mediator

Critical review of texts (e.g. anthems/clips/film excerpts)

Prepare an bilingual and bicultural resource

Self-reflection/introspective writing/debriefing interview

part, and then reflect on what they learned about the process of living an intercultural life. Following this, learners participated in analysing texts, listening to and singing songs, comparing timelines and events, and critically analysing values and ideologies. Through this they developed critical awareness, and more language and content knowledge related to history, national identity and philosophy—a more abstract domain than they had previously encountered. These experiences led towards the final one in which learners were expected to produce a bilingual and intercultural resource for prospective Indonesian peers or families intending to settle in Australia. For some, this meant creating videos about their local communities, others created a blog about Australia more generally, others provided instructions about where to source venues and services that might be of interest e.g. halal food, and others developed brochures about social life and how to navigate different cultural norms such as making friends and youth drinking culture. This was an open-ended challenge that required learners to draw on their entire repertoire of knowledge, skills, understandings and their intracultural identities, while adopting an ‘outsider’ (Indonesian) perspective to consider what to include. The sequence of experiences as a whole

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

85

afforded learners the opportunity to encounter new contexts and take on new roles and subject positions; from intrapersonal, familiar contexts to interpersonal, public contexts; and from intracultural self and observer, to intercultural participant and critical analyst, and finally, reflective and reflexive intercultural mediator. Many of the experiences were open-ended in order to encourage personalisation of learning. For example, the biography and email exchange enabled learners to portray their intracultural identities, the translating/mediating letter writing encouraged them to express their views on an issue, the ethnographic interview enabled them to explore areas of interest about intercultural experience, and the recount invited them to consider what was most meaningful to them about visiting the mosque. Learners were able to express their own meanings, offer their views, perspectives, and values through their language use and interactions. In addition, learners were encouraged to extend their learning through periodic reflection in relation to their experiences. An intercultural orientation recognises that reflection plays a crucial role in the process of decentring that facilitates deeper understandings of the situatedness of people and their meanings. As such, a line of reflection was built into some of the experiences in order to prompt learners to ‘stand back’ and develop a more abstracted understanding of what they had experienced. The reflections took various forms but were mainly questions such as, ‘What did you notice? What did you find suprising? What did you find uncomfortable? Was there anything that was unclear? What did you learn about yourself?, and often these kinds of questions were followed with, Why?, inviting learners to consider the origins and reasons for their responses. Typically the reflections were done in English however as learners’ repertoires expanded, reflective discussions were also in Indonesian or ‘bahasa campur’, a blend of languages. Finally, while I have outlined the key experiences in the program and how these were sequenced in order to foster the development of intercultural language learning, there is one further kind of experience that must be noted. It can be tempting to consider ‘experiences’ as those that exist outside of the classroom, in the ‘real-world’, however the classroom itself represents a ‘real’ context with its own experiential reality. That is, the teaching and learning that unfolds in the day-to-day life of a language classroom is an experience in its own right, with its own contextual conditions, semiotic resources, interactions, roles and relationships. While this

86

M. KOHLER

‘experience’ is not planned in the same way as more formalised experiences, it is nonetheless a significant experience and one in which, through interaction, learners are apprenticed into a new linguistic and cultural world where they learn to become intercultural language learners. This apprenticing process is particularly evident in the interactions that take place in the language classroom, as discussed in the next chapter.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the processes and considerations involved in designing a teaching and learning program that caters for development of intercultural language learning. The discussion shows that the process of designing a teaching and learning program is a complex one, involving attending to multiple features, layers, and connections in specific episodes, and over time. In fact, the process is somewhat analogous to weaving a tapestry, with various materials and features coming to the fore and then receding at different points, and yet all connected in ways that create a coherent whole. The discussion has shown that concepts, language, and experiences are particularly germain in considering development, as they can interrelate in ways that allow for building multiple connections and increasing sophistication in learning over time. This developmental backbone enables a strong sequence of learning to be developed across the units, each one extending, elaborating or contributing to the one before, and laying the path for those ahead. This sequencing and connecting process is guided by overarching mechanisms and culminating experiences, that maintain a focus on the program goals and thereby what is important for learners and who they aspire to be. A teaching and learning program represents one form for realising the aims and goals of language learning and development within an intercultural orientation. As noted previously, a program is a statement of intentions for teaching and learning at a particular point in time, and while it can be designed to respond to learners’ and their changing lifeworlds, it cannot fully depict what will transpire as the lived program. It is to this that I now turn, to discuss how my program was brought to life with students.

3

DESIGNING PROGRAMS FOR DEVELOPING …

87

References Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2007). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 793–828). New York: Wiley. Byram, M., Holmes, P., & Savvides, N. (2013). Intercultural communicative competence in foreign language education: Questions of theory, practice and research. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 251–253. Byrnes, H., Maxim, H. H., & Norris, J. M. (2010). Realizing advanced foreign language writing development in collegiate education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94(Suppl.), 1–235. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19–25. Harklau, L. (2008). Developing qualitative longitudinal case studies of advanced language learners. In L. Ortega & H. Byrnes (Eds.), The longitudinal study of advanced L2 capacities (pp. 23–35). New York: Routledge. Kohler, M. (2003). Developing continuity through long term programming. Babel, 38(2), 9–16, 38. Kohler, M., & Mahnken, P. (2010). The current state of Indonesian language education in Australian schools. Retrieved from Canberra. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2016). Classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 6(3), 377–393. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Lo Bianco, J., & Slaughter, Y. (2009). Second languages and Australian schooling. Retrieved from Melbourne. Pinnegar, S., & Hamilton, M. L. (2009). Self-study of practice as a genre of qualitative research: Theory, methodology, and practice. New York: Springer. Risager, K. (2012). Linguculture and transnationality: The cultural dimensions of language. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 101–115). Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic.

CHAPTER 4

Enacting and Mediating the Development of Intercultural Language Learning

Abstract This chapter explores the enactment dimension of teachers’ work in developing intercultural language learning. It revisits the notion of pedagogical stance and considers how this influences aspects such as classroom interaction and discourse, representations of language and culture, and mediation through teacher talk, texts and resources. The discussion considers the notion of positioning, and the roles that learners may take as part of their development as intercultural language learners over time. Keywords Enactment · Classroom interaction · Mediation · Subject position

The process of bringing a program to life is possibly more difficult to represent than the processes involved in planning it. In this chapter, I explain how the program was enacted with my class. I consider a number of aspects of enactment related to the life of the language classroom, including my pedagogical stance and creating a culture for language learning within an intercultural orientation. The discussion draws on selected examples to consider aspects such as explicit instruction, mediation and interaction, working with texts, tasks and experiences, and using resources of various kinds. Throughout the discussion I highlight

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_4

89

90

M. KOHLER

leitmotifs that recurred in the teaching of the program, and the role that these played in creating coherence and a sense of development of interculturality for the learners, and the teacher.

Dimensions of Enactment Teaching and learning are complex, sociocultural acts that fundamentally involve the interaction of individuals with their own linguistic and cultural frameworks and identities. As such, both teaching and learning are embodied processes that involve the exchange of information, ideas, meanings, and of individuals themselves. Thus, teaching and learning are highly subjective and intersubjective processes that will shape what can be taught and learned, and ultimately how learners develop in relation to the program. Enacting an intercultural orientation, as intended in the planned program, involves various processes that are underpinned by the teacher’s pedagogical stance. Pedagogical Stance My own stance as a language teacher is informed by my understanding of an intercultural orientation developed through more than two decades of teaching and research in this area. I regard my stance as having many of the understandings and characteristics of an intercultural orientation outlined in Chapter 2: multilingual and intercultural, persons and personalisation, knowledge and knowing , mediation, transformation through reflection. In the discussion that follows, I will draw connections with these as I explain how I enacted the program. Given that my students had limited prior experience with intercultural language learning, I knew it was important to create a culture that would be supportive of them encountering this orientation for the first time. This meant the need to establish a classroom culture in which learners were aware of the orientation being taken, and the expectations of them, and of the teacher. It was also important, given that the program was part of a research study, to inform them of this as part of the wider context in which the program was situated. From the outset, therefore, I engaged in a dialogue with learners about the nature of the program, its orientation and its role in research, and an invitation to them to participate in an open, and on-going evaluation of the program and process. This open, dialogic and participatory approach became a norm of our joint activity

4

ENACTING AND MEDIATING THE DEVELOPMENT …

91

in the classroom and encouraged learners to explore their curiosity and develop an inquiry stance (Wells, 1999). An interculturally oriented language classroom also necessitates the development of a shared discourse among the classroom members. To begin with, learners were preoccupied with vocabulary items and grammatical forms, often asking for lists of words that could be memorised. Their discourse reflected a strong structural and cognitive view of language learning that, while important, would not be sufficient for an intercultural orientation. Hence, our classroom discussions needed to develop learners’ discourses for semiotic work including engaging in analysis, interpretation, and reflection (Kearney, 2016). We had to develop a shared language for talking about language, culture, meaning and intercultural language learning. We explicitly discussed the aims and goals of the program, and the notion of language learning as a process of multilingual and intercultural development. In our discussions it became evident that learners had never considered themselves as emergent bilinguals and had not contemplated how they may be changed by the experience of learning an additional language. After these initial awareness-raising discussions, we would regularly take time to explore learners’ observations, reactions, and feelings about how their language learning was impacting on them and their sense of identity. They were encouraged to keep notes of their own observations, interpretations, curiosities and reactions. Over time, they developed a discourse about their language learning, using terminology such as interpretation, perspective, values, assumptions and subject positions, to discuss their learning. The physical environment of the classroom offered limited support for language learning. The class took place in a university building located in the city away from the main campus and the teaching rooms where Indonesian had been taught previously, and that were adorned by Indonesian-related realia and resources. As a semiotic space, our classroom was rather bereft, with minimal textual resources (mainly documents related to evacuation procedures and university services) and rather traditional arrangement of facilities such as the whiteboard, computer display and furniture. This made for a rather sterile, institutional environment that increased the need to bring in materials and artifacts that would stimulate learners’ imagination and create some sense of Indonesian-ness in our classroom. To some degree, the nature of the space placed greater emphasis on the language teacher as a representation of Indonesian

92

M. KOHLER

language and culture, and of ways of being multilingual and intercultural. The language classroom can be understood as a cultural site with its own community, where learners are apprenticed into the group’s discourse practices, interactional norms, and disciplinary ways of being (Van Lier, 2004). The language teacher is a significant figure in this community, explicitly and implicitly modeling the discourses and ways of being (Kohler, 2015), and using language to mediate learners’ own development as members of the group. Mediating Through Instruction and Interactive Talk As Cole (1994) states, language is the master mediating tool and in the language classroom, the language of the teacher is crucial in creating the affordances for learning, mediating between learners’ existing conceptual, linguistic and cultural framework and the one being learned (Kohler, 2015). In the language classroom, language is particularly powerful as it is both the object of study, and the medium through which learning takes place (Halliday, 1975). Language has various purposes and functions: as the medium through which processes are conducted including instruction, interaction, and reflection, and as the subject matter to be learned i.e. the target language, as well as the language of language learning such as metalinguistic terms. In enacting my program, I used a range of language for a range of purposes. During direct instruction I included a range of meaning and form focussed statements and questions, as well as some that were open-ended and interpretive. For example, one of the text analysis tasks included three sections, the first focussed on comprehension of the text in terms of ideas and events e.g. What is the main character concerned about? State three of her reasons for this. The next section was form and meaning focused, with questions such as ‘Find three Object Focus construction/passive sentences. Write the sentence, label the parts (Subject, Verb, Object) and translate into “good” English.’ This instruction encouraged learners to apply their grammatical knowledge, and develop their capability to mediate meaning, through translating at the level of sentences, paying attention to equivalence or not of meaning. The final section focused on critical analysis, interpretation and reflection, with learners asked to state and explain their views using evidence from the text i.e. (1) Who do you think this text has been written for and what do you consider to be the main theme?, (2) What cultural values

4

ENACTING AND MEDIATING THE DEVELOPMENT …

93

do you see in the text? Where do these ‘show through’ the language? Give examples to support your view, and (3) What is your response to the text and its theme? Why? What do you think your reactions are based on? These questions were designed to move learners from the concrete to the abstract, and from the interpersonal to the personal; reflecting the characteristics of knowledge and knowing , and of personalisation. My instructions were sometimes framed as suggestions or options, encouraging learner agency and choice, and allowing demands to be adjusted for the level of particular learners. For example, early in the program, learners were required to have a conversation with the teacher recounting a time they were unwell or injured (Waktu saya sakit ). Students could determine what event from the past they chose to discuss or could create an imagined event if they preferred. The aim was to encourage maximum use of the target language through connecting with learners’ personal experiences, and allowing them to select scaffolds such as props, images or vocabulary to mediate their meanings. Furthermore, I used instructions as a means of building connections between individual tasks and experiences, signposting what was ahead and reminding learners of two layers of activity and time; the immediate specific experience, and the on-going cumulative learning that they would bring to subsequent experiences. For example, the recount from the visit to the mosque included the following note: Keep notes about what you have learned about (a) your own reactions and thinking about the topic and (b) the Indonesian language you needed to use to express ideas related to religion and beliefs, as these may be useful for your final assignment. Using instructions in this way allowed for a kind of meta-conversation about learning as a long-term process that did not finish with any given experience or task. In class discussions, I often used open-ended questions as invitations to learners to share their observations and interpretations, without any sense of these being right or wrong. Prompts such as ‘What do you notice?’ or ‘What do you make of this?’ foregrounded interpretation, and offered learners the potential for further interpretation or adjustment in light of new information, be that from the teacher, other students, or from another interpretation of the text. I frequently probed learners’ views with questions such as ‘Why do you say that?’ or ‘How do you know?’, inviting them to reflect and think critically about their assumptions and situatedness. Sometimes I would invite learners to consider other perspectives with questions such as ‘What if you were from a rural area?’ or ‘Whose perspectives can you see in this text? Whose voice is missing?’ When

94

M. KOHLER

discussing culture in particular, my comments and explanations were often characterised by qualifying statements, as I moved between generalisations and specific examples (Risager, 2006). In order to support my statements or explanations, I often drew on personal anecdotes to exemplify a point or provide a contrasting example. I recall one occasion when I shared an anecdote in order to disrupt learners’ assumption that Indonesian families are ‘closer’ than Western families. I explained that in my experience of living with a busy, affluent, urban Indonesian family in Jakarta, there was not one occasion when the family ate together. My anecdote offered an alternative view in order to show variability and expand learners’ knowledge and interpretive frames. My discourse was characterised by caveats such as ‘maybe’ or ‘some…’ or ‘it is both… and…’ as I attempted to indicate the multiplicity, variability and nuance of phenomena, meanings, perspectives and values. This use of language modelled for learners how they too might refer to such notions in their own expression when referring to aspects of language and culture. Indonesian and English were employed at different times, and for different purposes in classroom interaction. At times, Indonesian was the primary language because the aim was communicating in the target language through processes such as socialising, describing, stating, comparing or giving opinions. At other times, such as when translating and analysing texts, the stimulus text was in Indonesian and the discussion was in English, enabling exploration of the process of interpreting meaning across languages and cultures, and reflecting on the role of language and culture in shaping interpretation. As the year progressed and learners expanded their repertoires including developing some language for reflection, the interactions were increasingly demanding as they were conducted bilingually, interweaving Indonesian and English. The various forms of language use reflected a multilingual orientation, and became a shared ‘web of meanings’ (Kearney, 2016) that enabled us to move through time, referencing back and forth between episodes, in order to make sense of our experiences. Mediating Through Texts and Resources Across the program we interacted with various texts and resources that were crucial in mediating the target language and culture, introducing more complex learning demands, and building connections in learning. Texts offer the potential to explore linguistic and cultural meanings in

4

ENACTING AND MEDIATING THE DEVELOPMENT …

95

relation to one’s own language and culture. In the Indonesian program, we would often analyse the text at a number of levels, for initial comprehension of details, then closer analysis of language use and cultural meanings, and then more personal and critical interpretation of ideas and themes. These layers of analysis enabled learners to consider meanings from a range of perspectives and at more abstracted levels, ranging from surface meanings to deeper political and ideological ones. Learners were invited to critically analyse texts to consider their historical and temporal situatedness, purpose and significance. For example, in exploring the story Kecelakaan (The Accident/Misadventure) by well-known Indonesian author Mochtar Lubis, learners considered post-colonial Indonesia and criticisms of the fledgling government in failing to care for all people. The text provoked discussion, in both Indonesian and English, of inequality, power and indifference to suffering that was of both historical significance but also, for learners, relevant to the present. We considered questions such as ‘What would you have done in this situation [of causing an accident]?’, ‘How does our society deal with such situations? Is this sufficient to protect everyone’s rights?’ and ‘Do you notice any inequality in your world? What might you do about it?’ I found that texts such as these were particularly beneficial for developing intercultural language learning as they provided learners with unfamiliar contexts, ideas, beliefs and subject positions that sometimes created moral or ethical dilemmas for them. In working through these, learners had to engage with linguistic and cultural meanings, develop their analytic skills, and come to recognise the symbolic force of language (Kramsch, 2006, 2011). Attuning learners to texts as linguistic and culturally constructed chunks of meaning, not only affords critical and ethical engagement, but also emotional responses that are important for connecting experiences to memories, and therefore to development. As we interacted with the ideas and meanings embedded in texts, learners were asked to observe theirs and others’ reactions and consider where these might come from, and how they impacted their interpretations and experiences. This was particularly the case with texts that presented somewhat taboo or controversial topics such as polygamy, poverty and inequality, gender and faith (e.g. women in Islam). It was crucial to establish shared norms for exploring personal responses, including highlighting the need for mutual respect and remaining open to divergent views, noting that these are shaped by our enculturation and experiences. We built up a

96

M. KOHLER

range of terms for exploring reactions and views, including ways of qualifying generalised statements, such as ‘in this case’ or explaining opinions, such as ‘perhaps…’ or ‘some…’. Developing this kind of metalanguage encouraged learners to engage earnestly and offer a range of views that challenged both their language development and their capacity to engage with otherness (Byram & Wagner, 2018). Texts of all kinds are resources for intercultural language teaching and learning, and the way that learners interact with them, including accessing and creating them, raises the matter of technology and its role in developing intercultural language learning. Within the Indonesian program, digital technology in particular played important roles in learning as a means for accessing ideas and information, for processing and interpreting texts, for communicating, for managing, manipulating and creating texts, and for viewing and enjoying texts. Learners were encouraged throughout and particularly in the translation task, to use online translation software to assist in comprehending and constructing texts. One of the early tasks in the program was to translate and respond to a text, while carrying out a think-aloud process. My intention was to explicitly address the use of translation tools to highlight how meaning travels across languages and cultures, and to develop learners’ skills in using such resources to mediate their own meanings as part of their development towards becoming intercultural mediators. Learners often used mobile phones to access and check meanings, select vocabulary, and compare language choices with others. Connecting with the realities of digital devices in learners’ lives was not only valuable for mediating their language learning and use, but validated learners themselves and their ways of making meaning. Learners themselves represent a resource in intercultural language learning, not only in terms of their lifeworlds and interpretive frames, but also as creators of meaning (Levine, 2020; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). In learning to communicate across languages and cultures, learners are involved in constructing meanings in unique ways as they bring together two meaning systems. In our class, we shared learners’ responses on the translation task, noting how each had (a) translated the original from Indonesian to English, and (b) constructed their own response to the email. We compared form and meanings, noting similarities and differences, and considering why these arose as well as how to mediate them e.g. adding an explanatory statement or giving an example. We discussed how the texts may be received, and what assumptions were at work on both sides of the communication; creator and receiver. Hence, learners’

4

ENACTING AND MEDIATING THE DEVELOPMENT …

97

language work represented a resource for further learning particularly when shared with other learners. A further resource for intercultural language learning is that of the target language community both in the home country and, where available, in the learners’ local community. As noted earlier, given the limited exposure my learners had previously had with Indonesian speakers, my aim was to increase their access and participation in the Indonesianspeaking community across the program. We initially interacted with Indonesians through written texts such as emails and stories, moving to face-to-face engagement through the teacher facilitated mosque visit, and then the independently conducted ethnographic interview. For these latter interactions, we developed potential questions and responses about the specific topics, considered how these might be received, and developed learners’ strategic competence for managing the interaction and mediating any misunderstandings (e.g. Tolong ulangi [Could you please repeat that]; Minta ma’af, maksud saya …[Apologies, I meant…]). The combination of strategies and awareness of the reciprocal nature of the interpretation of meaning provide invaluable in enabling learners to interact effectively on each occasion, and on return to class, share their observations about the experiences as a further source of learning for all. Finally, as the creator and primary enactor of the language program, the language teacher is an essential resource and the quintessential gobetween (Kramsch, 2004) between participants and the languages and cultures that are available for learning. In my program, I acted as a resource by demonstrating ways to engage in language learning and use, including interpreting, problem-solving, mediating, critically analysing, and reflecting. I was conscious of being a model for learners of how to interact multilingually and interculturally, and at times would use languages separately or in combined/meshed forms to show how to navigate one’s resource to maximise the meaning potentials it offers. We would often discuss matters such as judging the communicative demands, and how to read expectations and assumptions of others in interaction. I was open to sharing my experiences and challenges in communicating across languages and cultures, such as explaining how I had managed situations where it was assumed that I was married, when in fact I was not. We considered these tensions and dilemmas, noting that these can often arise when diverse views and meaning systems come together, and noting that managing these requires critical self-awareness. The willingness of the language teacher to examine and share her own historicity and

98

M. KOHLER

situatedness, will impact on the extent that this is available as a resource for intercultural language learning. If there is openness and critical selfreflection, the language teacher can draw on such experiences to resource learning (Kohler, 2015; Kramsch & Zhang, 2018), and furthermore, can act as an example for learners of the potential ways of being multilingual and intercultural, and show how one’s expanded identity may be navigated and develops over time.

Conclusion Part of the challenge in working within an intercultural orientation in language teaching is explaining how it unfolds in the daily life of a classroom. Bringing a program to life requires attending to a complex interplay of multiple dimensions as they travel through multiple timescales. In this chapter, I have attempted to render some of this complexity through recounting experiences with learners, outlining indicative examples, and reflecting on poignant moments in enacting the program for Intermediate Indonesian. One of the constants of enacting an interculturally oriented language program is that of language; it is the primary substance of teaching and learning, and the primary mediator of it. Language is the medium through which the processes of interacting, instructing, mediating, and reflecting that are so influential in shaping learning, take place. The discourse created in the classroom by the learners and teacher as they work closely with texts of all kinds, provides a crucial connecting thread across the program. Learners are inducted into a discourse about language learning, interculturality and identity, and they explore what this discourse means for them, how to participate in it, and who it enables them to be. Through this chapter, we have seen glimpses of how a particular program was enacted, and this example has highlighted the nature and importance of interaction and the roles that learners can adopt, as communicators, analysers and reflective language learners. Positioning learners in ways that enable them to take on different roles enables them to decentre from their own assumptions and subjectivities, and ‘see’ from different vantage points. Resources of various kinds can be used to support such work, and to explore and build connections between aspects of language and culture, and interpretations and perspectives of learners. The most crucial resource of all is the language teacher as the one who holds together the planned and the enacted program at any given

4

ENACTING AND MEDIATING THE DEVELOPMENT …

99

moment and over time, weaving the connections that have been foreseen, and responding to those that emerge through the dynamic process of teaching and learning. The language teacher is the ultimate resource for imagining and creating the connections that underpin coherence and the developmental pathway for intercultural language learning. What can happen when learners travel such a pathway is the subject of the next chapter.

References Byram, M., & Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 140– 151. Cole, M. (1994). A conception of culture for a communication theory of mind. In D. R. Vocate (Ed.), Intrapersonal communication: Different views, different minds (pp. 77–98). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language. London: Edward Arnold. Kearney, E. (2016). Intercultural learning in modern language education: Expanding meaning-making potentials. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kohler, M. (2015). Teachers as mediators in the foreign language classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kramsch, C. (2004). The language teacher as go-between. Utbildning & Demokrati, 13(3), 37–60. Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Kramsch, C., & Zhang, L. (2018). The multilingual instructor what foreign language teachers say about their experience and why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, G. S. (2020). A human ecological language pedagogy. Modern Language Journal, 104(Suppl.). Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Risager, K. (2006). Language and culture: Global flows and local complexity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Assessing and Evidencing the Development of Intercultural Language Learning

Abstract This chapter starts by outlining key issues and challenges in assessing intercultural language learning and the increasing interest in alternative and learning-oriented assessment in this area. The discussion turns to the case study focusing on two aspects: the assessment scheme orientation and design; and the assessment experience, including evidencing students’ learning. Matters such as the nature and range of assessment processes, cumulative mechanisms and the role of reflection in development are examined. Furthermore, an analysis of learners’ responses is provided as a basis for considering the processes of eliciting and judging evidence of intercultural language learning over time. Keywords Learning-oriented assessment · Assessment design · Eliciting and judging · Evidence

In this chapter, I extend the case study of the Intermediate Indonesian program into the realm of assessment, considering how assessment can shed light on the developmental nature of intercultural language learning. I begin by briefly summarising some of the considerations and issues in assessing within an intercultural orientation, and then present the main discussion in two parts: the rationale and design of assessment, and the experience of it. I draw on the assessment performances of three learners in particular in order to explore in some detail what an assessment © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_5

101

102

M. KOHLER

perspective might reveal about the development of intercultural language learning. The chapter concludes with observations about the affordances that assessment offers in terms of intercultural language learning, and in furthering our understandings of the development of it for learners.

Issues and Considerations in Assessing Intercultural Language Learning Assessment is recognized as the least understood area of interculturally oriented language teaching, and yet assessment is crucial to shedding light on the nature and extent of learning that has occured (Deardorff, 2011, 2015; Dervin, 2010; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2020; Sercu, 2010). There are many issues that arise due to the incompatibility of the construct of intercultural language learning with traditional views of language assessment. These matters have been canvassed extensively elsewhere (c.f. Liddicoat and Scarino [2020]) therefore I wish to highlight some aspects about assessment that are particularly pertinent to understanding its role in considering the development of intercultural language learning. Assessment is typically understood as the process whereby learners demonstrate their learning and others, usually teachers, make judgments about the adequacy and quality of their performances in relation to a given standard. This view of assessment resides within a traditional paradigm in which the primary purpose of assessment is to determine the ‘state’ of learning at a given point, that is, it is summative in nature. While this kind of assessment can play an important role in language assessment, it is less conducive in considering language learning within an intercultural and developmental orientation. Formative assessment is more oriented towards learning in that it focuses on ‘informing’ subsequent teaching and learning with a concern for how learners progress over the long-term. This orientation means that assessment needs to mirror understandings of teaching and learning as on-going processes that build up over time. If assessment is understood in this way, there is a need to conceptualise it as a series of connected processes designed to afford opportunities for learners to show their increasingly sophisticated learning. This is not to suggest that assessment should be linear or somehow incremental but rather that it needs to be thought of as a system or ecology that when considered as a whole, captures various dimensions of learning. In planning assessment, therefore, teachers need to consider what each process enables learners to demonstrate in relation to the goals and objectives as

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

103

intended, and what information this yields overall about learners’ actual, including unintended, development. As outlined previously, an intercultural orientation is premised on an expanded construct of language learning that goes beyond constructs that have traditionally been used for designing assessment (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, 2010). This means that assessment processes also need to be expanded in order to capture the kinds of learning that reflect a shift towards greater personalization of language learning and connections to learner identity and affect. There is a need for assessment to be within a ‘performance-based, learner-centered paradigm that is relevant, collaborative, integrated, and more meaningful to the learner’ (Kramsch, 2006, p. 251). Making assessment more meaningful suggests attending to learners as ‘whole persons with hearts, bodies, and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities’ (Stobart & Gipps, 2010; Wiggins, 1994), and recognizing that learning is embodied and ‘personally unique for each individual’ (Deardorff, 2015, p. 5). The kinds of processes that are needed to do this are those typically associated with alternative assessment that aims to assess learning that has actually taken place and has been meaningful to learners based on the curriculum they have actually experienced. Such assessment is designed to be responsive and allow the ‘best opportunity for students to show what they actually know’ (Deardorff, 2015, p. 5). Indeed, it is one of the purposes of alternative educational assessment to ‘gauge learning in relation to the learner him/herself, with the fundamental intention of helping the learner improve’ (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2010, p. 55). This emphasis on improvement is important when considering development of intercultural language learning as assessment takes on a learning orientation as it encourages learner autonomy and self-awareness that informs their on-going learning. Deardorff (2011) proposes two types of assessments for eliciting intercultural learning: direct and indirect. Direct measures include learning contracts, e-portfolios, critical reflection, and observation of performance in authentic situations e.g. with a host family. Indirect evidence gathering processes include surveys/questionnaires, interviews and focus groups. While developed primarily for study-abroad programs, many of these processes are relevant to the classroom context and the notion of direct and indirect forms of assessment is useful for considering how to capture both the visible, performance-based learning such as communicative language use, as well as the less visible analytic, reflective learning and meta-understandings. Processes such as think-alouds,

104

M. KOHLER

explanatory commentaries, journaling and class discussions, are also useful for eliciting learners’ thinking and reasoning processes both during and following the learning experience. A further consideration in assessing intercultural language learning is how a learners’ linguistic repertoire may be drawn upon in order for them to give maximum expression to their learning. While there needs to be a focus on target language use, this need not be to the exclusion of a learner’s first language or indeed other languages, and there can be scope for translanguaging, and hybrid forms of use. In addition, it is likely that learners’ proficiency level may not match their conceptual level in the early stages of their learning and therefore there is a legitimate place in assessment for giving space to learners’ first language/s in expressing aspects such as interpretation, reflection and self-awareness. Finally, an intercultural orientation assumes that objectivity is not the goal of assessment and instead it recognizes that assessment, just like teaching and learning, is a sociocultural process in which people interact with their respective interpretations and subjectivities. This means that processes of eliciting and judging need to remain open to a certain degree in order to allow for both intended and unintended learning to be shown. Assessments can be designed in ways that are responsive and accommodating of variability through developing criteria that reflect the learning intentions, which themselves include different facets of intercultural language learning. Criteria that, for example, invite learners to articulate their reasoning or offer a personal view with a reflection on it are helpful in encouraging learners to not only reveal such learning but also to see that it is valued. Moreover, in assessing development or progress in intercultural language learning, processes and criteria need to encourage learners to show connections that they have been making such as between ideas, aspects of language and culture, and different episodes of learning over time.

Designing Assessment for Intercultural Language Learning The issues that I have outlined were influential in informing how I conceptualised and designed assessment within the Intermediate Indonesian program. My starting position was that my assessment was primarily learning-oriented; it was intended to inform learners and me about their learning such that they could work towards improvement and further

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

105

learning. Within an educative perspective, informing learners about their learning is arguably the most important accountability, however I also needed to be accountable to the institution in terms of reporting information about learners for accreditation purposes. University-wide requirements to include three assessments and individual grades provided some non-negotiable parameters for the assessment however within these there was scope for flexibility. In order to capture the various dimensions and developmental nature of intercultural language learning, it was necessary to design an assessment scheme for the full year of the program (see Table 3.2). This meant taking into account short-term and long-term perspectives whereby each assessment had its purpose within the specific unit and several also contributed to the culminating assessment. Some assessments focused primarily on communicative language use, for example the self-introduction, text analysis, and oral presentation, with learners expected to demonstrate increased knowledge of the target language, effective expression and communication strategies. Other assessments were multifaceted in order to elicit both language use, and understandings about language and culture, and learners’ interpretations and reactions in exchanging meanings across languages and cultures. The linguistic, conceptual and processing demands, as well as the subject positions, became increasingly demanding with each assessment. Three assessments directly required selfreflection: the translating/mediating and think aloud, the ethnographic interview, and the final bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection. Periodic reflection was thus a connecting thread across the assessment, building learners’ capability to think about their learning in this way, and leading to them reflecting on their overall development in the final piece. While each assessment contributed to the development of intercultural language learning, I will focus on a selection in order to show the design considerations and features that I found effective in eliciting aspects such as personalisation and reflection. The assessments included a number of common features to aid learners’ understanding of the expectations in demonstrating their learning. The titles showed the dimensions of language learning being assessed (e.g. type of knowledge, processes, text type) and a statement of purpose indicated connections between the assessment and the learning intentions. This was followed by a statement about the conditions under which the assessment was to be performed, such as the processes, use of resources, and expected nature of response e.g. language and

106

M. KOHLER

length/duration. The expectations and level of support reflected the increasing complexity of demands over time, such as the shift from short responses to questions early on, to more open-ended and self-directed responses in latter assessments. Each assessment was designed to capture learners’ increased knowledge, conceptually, linguistically and in terms of their meta-understandings. The criteria for judging learners’ performance included relative weightings to reflect their value, and sometimes examples of specific language to signal expectations of linguistic complexity. The criteria were stated in minimal terms on the assignments however they were part of the on-going discussions about language, culture, learning and intercultural exchange. As each assessment was introduced, we discussed our understandings of the criteria, teasing out aspects of intercultural language learning including: – using language/s to communicate meanings; – knowledge of language/s and culture/s, and connections between them; – mediating processes such as interpreting and conveying meanings, adapting to alternative perspectives – analyzing language and culture as symbolic meaning sytems – recognising positionality, including decentring and adopting alternative perspectives, and – reflecting on self as language learner, expressing self-awareness and reflexivity. The first of the three assessments that I outline is the translating/mediating and think aloud assessment that had three parts as shown in Fig. 5.1. I had several reasons for designing this assessment as I did. I wanted to provide learners with a provocation that would stimulate their curiosity, present an unfamiliar scenario, and give them reason to consider and express their own views. The stimulus text was also authentic, and I explained this in discussing the expectations with learners, which seemed to add value to it as learners regarded it as an opportunity to develop their learning in addition to demonstrating it. Furthermore, I was interested in probing how learners were using the target language, drawing on their own linguistic and cultural framework both in interpreting the meanings of another (part a) and in constructing

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

107

their own meanings (part b). Both of these processes could be judged on the product, the translated text and the target language response, however by adding the think-aloud process, I was able to capture the processing of meaning and decision making occurring during the other two parts, revealing the mediation process itself. This process was crucial for informing me about the nature and effectiveness of learners’ mediating strategies, what they needed to develop, and how aware they were of the process of mediating in intercultural interactions. The criteria for judging learning and their relative value reflected the focus to this point TRANSLATING, MEDIATING, WRITING IN INDONESIAN, 20% Read, translate and respond, in approximately 250 words in Indonesian, to the le er to an advice column provided below. The purpose of this assignment is to assess your ability to understand and respond to an authen c text by wri ng extended Indonesian in a meaningful way, using new vocabulary and grammar in context. It also aims to show your decision-making and use of strategies for making meaning when using both Indonesian and English. You may use support materials such as the textbook and (electronic) dic onaries/ translators, however, if you do keep within your language range and explain what you did and why. There are three parts to this assessment: A. read and translate the text into the ‘best’ English you can, B. write a response to the text, in approximately 250 words in Indonesian, and C. capture your reac ons to the text including the language used (in Part A) and your decisions about how you responded (in Part B). You can choose to EITHER write OR audio-record a commentary (preferably as you do the assessment e.g. as a ‘think-aloud’). Submit the wri en/audio commentary with your wri en response to Part A and B. Criteria for judging performance Ability to comprehend Indonesian and apply transla on strategies to convey meaning effec vely in English (i.e. beyond literal/word-for-word transla on) Ability to construct an extended, cohesive text, applying new vocabulary and grammar knowledge (e.g. quali es and appearances, giving advice and solving problems (e.g. menyarankan supaya, mengusulkan supaya), conjunc ons (e.g. sehingga/supaya) Ability to reflect on and explain thinking, reac ons and language choices

Fig. 5.1 The translating/mediating and think aloud assessment

Weigh ng 25%

50%

25%

108

M. KOHLER

TEXT Yang sakit haƟ Saya Zia, 34 tahun. Saya menikah keƟka berumur 26 tahun dan suami saya berumur 30 tahun. Pernikahan kami Ɵdak berdasarkan rasa cinta tetapi perjodohan oleh orang tua. Saat ini kami sudah memiliki 2 anak yang berusia 9 dan 5 tahun. Saya dan suami saya bekerja sebagai pegawai negeri sipil. Saya dan suami saya sering hidup terpisah, karena suami saya bekerja di Kabupaten lain sementara saya bekerja di Ibukota dan hidup bersama anak-anak. Saya dan suami bertemu hanya pada akhir minggu sehingga sulitnya komunikasi antara kami. Kami seolah-olah berasal dari dua dunia yang berbeda. Ditambah lagi pada tahun 2008 saya ke Amerika untuk studi di universitas. Waktu saya pulang, suami sudah berubah dan Ɵdak ada cinta diantara kami. Hari demi hari pernikahan kami semakin hambar, apalagi pada tahun 2012 saya kembali ke Amerika untuk studi lagi. Semua anggota keluarga saya menyarankan supaya bercerai saja.

Keluarga saya Ɵdak terkejut waktu suami saya memilih seorang WIL (Wanita Idaman Lain). Ini yang menyebabkan suami saya Ɵdak pernah membiayai saya dan anak-anak, karena gajinya diberikan kepada wanita lain. Saya Ɵdak bisa menerima status janda yang masih dianggap buruk di Indonesia. Saya harus memperƟmbangkan kondisi anak-anak saya yang masih menghormaƟ bapaknya. Kedua anak saya perlu seorang bapak dan ibu. Saya hanya bisa menangis dan berdoa. Saya perlu pendapat lain untuk membantu saya. Apakah saya harus menceraikan suami saya atau meneruskan pernikahan walaupun penuh dengan kepura-puraan? Apakah sebaiknya saya menyerahkan karir dan menjadi ibu rumah tangga? Kalau ada saran tentang persoalan ini, saya sangat berterima kasih. Zia

Kosa kata/vocab berdasarkan – based on perjodohan – matchmaking terpisah – separate ditambah lagi moreover

demi – by/per hambar – lifeless/listless bercerai –divorce Wanita idaman lain – a mistress gaji – wage/salary janda – widow/divorcee memperƟmbangkan – evaluate/weigh up kepura-puraan – pretence/pretending menyerahkan – to surrender/give up

TRANSLATION [Shared with students following their own aƩempts] The broken-hearted I’m Zia and I’m 34 years old. I was married at 26 and my husband was 30. Our marriage was not based on love but was arranged by our parents. Now, we have 2 children who are 9 and 5. My husband and I both work as public servants. My husband and I o en live apart, because he works in a different Kabupaten (district) while I work in the capital city and live with the kids. We meet only on weekends so communica on is a problem for us. It’s as if we come from different worlds. In addi on, in 2008 I went back to the US to study at university. When I got back, my husband had changed and we were no longer in love. Li le by li le our marriage withered, especially in 2012 when I went back again to study in America. All of my family urged me to get a divorce. My family wasn’t surprised when my husband took a mistress. This is what caused him to stop financially suppor ng us, because his money was given to her instead. I don’t want to be known as a divorcee as that is still seen as something bad in Indonesia. I have to consider my kids who s ll respect their dad. They need a mum and a dad. All I can do is cry and pray.

Fig. 5.1 (continued)

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

109

I need another opinion to help me Should I divorce my husband or con nue the marriage even though it’s a pretense? Is it best to give up my career and become a housewife? If you have any sugges ons about my problem, I’d really appreciate it. Zia

Fig. 5.1 (continued)

in the program on developing learners’ capability to interpret meanings in Indonesian (in more extended text than previously) and their linguistic knowledge including the complex verb system. The combined value of these dimensions of learning was by far the majority (75%) however I allocated 25% for reflection and awareness of the process of meaningmaking to signal that this learning is important and would be increasingly prominent in future. The next example is the recount about the class excursion to the local mosque. This assessment had one main purpose and process, as shown in Fig. 5.2. This assessment was designed to elicit learners’ content knowledge about Islam, and their ability to use the target language to recount and EXCURSION RECOUNT (20%) The purpose of this assignment is to assess your ability to use Indonesian to recount events and express your opinions about a significant topic. Visit a mosque (as a class excursion), interact with some of the congregation and write a recount about the experience. Prior to the visit, prepare a series of questions (some in Indonesian, English or combination) to guide your thinking and interaction during the visit. Following the visit, prepare a report (400 words in Indonesian) on the experience, including a description of the event itself and a summary of the key ideas and information presented and your views about what you have learned. *Keep notes about what you have learned about a) your own reactions and thinking about the topic and b) the Indonesian language you needed to use to express ideas related to religion and beliefs, as these may be useful for your final assignment. Criteria for judging performance Depth of knowledge of the topic Ability to use written Indonesian to recount an event and express opinions about the topic, including acknowledging diverse perspectives

Fig. 5.2 The excursion recount assessment

Weighting 40% 60%

110

M. KOHLER

reflect on an experience. The opportunity to enter into a mosque is not a common one for non-Muslims and for my learners all bar one (who had visited a mosque in Indonesia on her study tour) had never experienced this, making this a likely significant and memorable experience. The timing of this assessment meant that learners had developed some Indonesian for discussing issues and expressing differing viewpoints. Unlike earlier assessments, I chose to blur the lines between description in the target language, and reflection in English, complexifying the demands on learners by requiring them to use Indonesian also for reflection. The criteria reflected an expectation that learners should consider their situatedness through commenting on differing perspectives on faith-related practices. My third example, the bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection, was the final assessment in which learners were required to bring together all of their learning from the course. The assessment had two parts as shown in Fig. 5.3. As the culminating experience in the course, this assessment was directly related to the overall goal of developing learners as intercultural mediators who could manage interactions and meaning exchange beyond an introductory level. The first process was intended to create a context in which learners were positioned as mediators, and a reason for them to act as mediators. They were required to adopt an ‘outsider/Indonesian’ perspective and attend to aspects such as ideas, norms and language use that would need to be mediated for them. Learners could choose the context, form and mode of mediation in order to encourage creativity and personalisation but also it enabled them to imagine their own role as mediators, not as an abstract or idealised notion, but as achievable and relevant to their own lifeworlds. As the final reflection, it was the most demanding as it covered the span of experiences across the program, and asked learners to be reflexive about their language learning and sense of identity. The weightings of the respective components of the assignment indicated the increased importance of reflection as a means of establishing what learning had actually developed overall. Overall, these assessments reflect important design considerations in eliciting learners’ development of intercultural language learning over time. Each assessment included a focus on communicating in the target language, and some degree of analysis and reflection, capturing three facets of intercultural language learning (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Related to these facets are the roles that learners can take in order

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

111

BILINGUAL/INTERCULTURAL RESOURCE (25%) AND REFLECTION (10%) The purpose of this assignment is to assess your ability to use Indonesian to create a resource for a particular audience, and to assess your understanding of the process of developing an intercultural and bilingual capability. This assignment builds on the ideas across this Course and has two components: 1. Develop a resource (equivalent to 700 words) that will provide support to an Indonesian person/family coming to live in Australia. The mode of the resource is negotiable, and the focus could include, for example, what to know about Australia in terms of the environment, people, values, past-times/lifestyle and of course, language. You should plan your resource and discuss it with your lecturer well in advance of the due date and make use of observations/notes you have made during the course and previous assignments. 2. Write a reflection (in English) of approximately 500 words on what you have learned across the Course about the role of language and culture in shaping who we are and how we interact, and what is involved in the process of becoming bilingual and acting interculturally – that is, what does it take to ‘fit in’ and how do you understand your own experience of this process e.g. what do you notice about your language use, interaction, identity, and sense of your own language and culture. Criteria for judging performance Quality of resource in terms of design of materials effective language use and choices that take account of the audience suitability of content for an Indonesian person/audience (Showing understanding of the perspective of an ‘other’) Depth of reflection on language use and awareness of own interaction and position and the role of language and culture in shaping interaction and identity

Weighting 60%

40%

Fig. 5.3 The bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection assessment

to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and understandings; as language learners and users, analysers of language and culture, and intercultural mediators. The examples also reveal how assessment can afford opportunities for learners to show connections that they have made, between ideas, language and culture knowledge, and experiences of using language in intercultural exchanges. Mechanisms such as interweaving threads (e.g. periodic reflection), and culminating processes that draw on prior experiences, require connections to be made, noticed and articulated. The set of assessments needs to be considered as a whole in order to capture the

112

M. KOHLER

range of dimensions and increasing demands associated with them over time, allowing learners to show how they manage these, for example, their capability for mediating, adopting diverse perspectives, and reflexivity. Furthermore, assessment itself can be understood as a kind of experience that can be made personally meaningful through processes that invite interpretation, reactions, and consideration of situatedness. The final assessment included the question ‘what does it take to ‘fit in?’ inviting learners to consider the concept of ‘adjustment’ and reflect on their own experience of it through their Indonesian language learning. It was a provocation, an invitation through assessment, to engage with this idea and an on-going conversation about it. This is precisely what some learners in the class did, as their responses below reveal.

Evidencing development of intercultural language learning With the assessment scheme in place for the year, it was then a case of enacting it with learners through the course of the Intermediate Indonesian program. From the outset, it was important to socialise the assessments with the class, particularly given that they were unfamiliar with these kinds of processes and views about language learning. It took some time to work through what might be expected and to reassure learners that it was acceptable and desirable that they express personal reactions and interpretations; that responses were not given a priori. Over the span of assessments, learners became more accepting and appreciative of the openness and opportunity to express their learning, not just perform it. The sense that assessment can enable learners to give voice to their learning, to express that which is embodied within them, is one that underpins the discussion of the responses of three learners to the assessments outlined previously. The responses are selected extracts from the originals and are presented according to each learner, Justin, Emma and Jim (all psuedonyms) comprising their own case of developing intercultural language learning. The translations are provided only to assist readers of this book and are loose translations only. They were not part of the students’ original responses. Example 1: Justin Justin had studied Introductory Indonesian, had not been to Indonesia, and was studying International Relations.

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

113

Extract 1: Translating/mediating and think aloud Aku menyarankan supaya kamu bercerai dengan suamimu karena kamu bisa mencari suami yang lebih baik untuk anak-anak. Walaupun tidak baik untuk menjadi janda di Indonesia, kamu bisa mencoba mencari suami yang baik hati. …Aku mengusulkan supaya kamu tidak menyerahkan karir dan menjadi Ibu Rumah Tangga. Karena suamimu mungkin hanya memberikan gajinya kepada wanita lain. Oleh karena itu kamu harus menghasilkan uang sendiri sehingga kamu bisa membiayai keperluan anak-anakmu. Aku kira kamu bisa mendapatkan perkerjaan bagus karena kamu pergi ke Amerika untuk kuliah di univeritas dua kali. Jadi kamu bisa berbahasa Inggris dan ada ijazah internasional. Tidak semua orang Indonesia memiliki hal-hal seperti ini jadi juga ada keuntungan. Translation: I suggest that you divorce your husband because you can find another husband that is better for your children. Although it’s not good to be a divorcee in Indonesia, you can try to find a nice husband. I advise you not to give up your career and become a housewife because your husband might just give his money to another woman. So, you have to have your own income so you can pay for your children’s needs. I think you could find good work because you have been to America twice to study. So you can speak English and have international experience. Not everyone in Indonesia has this so you are lucky.

In this extract, Justin offers his view on the predicament of Zia, the woman seeking advice about her polygamous relationship. He closely follows the key language introduced in the unit (e.g. menyarankan/mengusulkan supaya) in interacting with her. He acknowledges her status, as a married woman and mother, and recognises that as a divorcee her subject position would be culturally unacceptable in her context. Despite this he advises her to divorce her husband. He is navigating the cultural terrain, recognising the tension that divorce would create but making the judgment that this would be worthwhile. He is drawing on his own enculturation, where divorce is more acceptable and where government and community services are available for women seeking employment and income support. He assumes that Zia’s English and international experience will be an asset for her, possibly reflecting on his own privilege (So you are lucky). At this stage in the program, Justin is becoming aware of his assumptions and subject position, while continuing to hold to these.

114

M. KOHLER

Extract 2: Recount on mosque visit Pada tanggal 13 Oktober, saya dan teman-teman sekelas pergi ke masjid. Pak Jono menjelaskan konsep dasar tentang Islam. Dia berbicara tentang hal-hal yang dilakukan oleh orang muslim, dan asal aturan-aturan dalam Islam seperti Al-qur’an. Terus terang, saya tidak bisa bicara banyak dalam bahasa Indonesia. Saya bertanya “Apakah ada waktu khusus untuk naik haji?” Saya membuat kesalahan ketika bertanya namun Pak Jono mengerti maksud saya dan menjawab pertanyaan. Dia bilang kalau seseorang dari Indonesia, orang itu harus menunggu selama 25 tahun, tetapi jika dia orang Australia dia bisa pergi tahun ini. Saya pikir ini menarik… Kami berkeliling ke sekitar mesjid dan untuk saya hal yang paling mencolok adalah besarnya ruangan di sana. Tidak ada mebel ataupun kursi. Saya kira ini karena orang Muslim menundukkan kepala mereka di lantai. Translation: On 13 October, my classmates and I went to the mosque. Jono explained the foundations of Islam. He talked about what Moslems do, and the guidelines for Islam such as the Koran. Honestly, I didn’t say much in Indonesian. I asked, ‘Is there a particular time to take the haj/pilgrimage?’ I made a mistake but Jono understood my meaning and answered. He said if you are Indonesian, you have to wait 25 years, but if you are Australian you can go this year. I thought that was interesting… We wandered around the mosque and I was interested in the main room. There was no furniture or chairs. I think this was because Moslems bow their heads to the floor.

In this extract, Justin shows that he is aware of the limitations of his language repertoire, possibly feeling frustrated or embarrassed by this (I made a mistake). He notices the sensitivity of his interlocutor, Jono, the Indonesian community member guiding them. He also compares differences in norms and practices such as access to Mecca depending on country of origin. He possibly recognises that there is privilege associated with being Australian and notice that he is situated within that. He observes features of the mosque environment, perhaps implicitly comparing it to his knowledge of church settings, and tries to make sense of why the environment is as it is. He shows curiosity, and is problematizing how to make sense of the communicative demands, and the situational and cultural context. This extract is from Justin’s brochure advising Indonesians how to make friends in Australia. This example focuses on perceptions of time and politeness norms.

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

115

Extract 3: Bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection Jam Karet Persoalan: Berteman dengan Orang Australia susah sekali kalau seseorang yang tidak tepat waktu. Di Australia terlambat 10-15 menit dianggap perbuatan yang tidak sopan. Kenapa: Orang Australia biasanya sibuk sekali, sehingga mereka menanggap waktu seperti hal yang bernilai. Jadi kalau seseorang membuang waktu orang Australia akan merasa marah. Kalau seseorang terlambat hanya satu kali mereka tidak peduli tapi kalau sesorang sering terlambat, orang Australia akan berhenti mengajak orang itu. Solusi: Untuk menghindari persoalan ini, cobalah untuk tidak terlambat lebih dari sepuluh menit. Kalau Anda tahu anda akan tiba terlambat, Anda sebaiknya segera memberitahu orang Australia. Pastikan Anda memberikan alasan yang benar dan jelas kenapa Anda datang terlambat (misalnya keluarga Anda sakit). Mereka pasti mengerti. Translation: Rubber time The problem: Making friends with an Australian is very difficult if you are someone who doesn’t keep to time. In Australia being 10-15 minutes late is considered impolite. Why: Australians are usually very busy, so they consider time as valuable. If you are someone who takes time, Australians will get cross. If someone is late once they won’t mind but if you’re often late, Australians will stop inviting you. Solution: To avoid this problem, try to not be more than 10 minutes late. If you know you will arrive late, it’s best that you immediately let them know. Certainly you need to give a clear and truthful reason why you were late (such as if your family are sick). They will certainly understand.

In this final assessment, Justin frames the whole response through his own experiential lens as he has become increasingly involved in the local Indonesian community. His draws on his experiential knowledge to explain cultural norms as he understands them, in this case, politeness and its impact on relationships. He uses his expanded language range and knowledge of Indonesia to discuss concepts such as rubber time (jam karet ) and contrasting it with his own sense of time as more rigid. He has learned to decentre, and see situations where norms and expectations may differ and create tensions between cultural perspectives. He recognises that behaviours can be interpreted differently depending on one’s enculturation, and he understands that behaviours are imbued with

116

M. KOHLER

values such as clarity and honesty. He has also developed some strategies to navigate diverse perspectives such that he can ‘fit in’ even if this is somewhat uncomfortable and uncertain for him. He is showing signs of becoming more aware and reflective as an intercultural language learner and mediator. Justin’s final reflection reveals his overall development. This semester I have started to nongkrong [hang out] with many Indonesians. I have joined AIYA, volunteered at events, made Indonesian friends and hung out with Pak M. about ten times (so I know at least one Indonesian on a more than superficial level). I unfortunately have the habit of formulating my response in English, translating it into Indonesian in my mind and then responding with the translation. Not only does this produce an awkward delay of a second or two between the question asked and the answer given but it also means that I am not really speaking Indonesian. Apart from Indonesian words, grammar and pronunciation there is also an Indonesian way of speaking. For example at a recent event I was asked why I didn’t do something. I responded that I was too lazy because I was tired. When an Indonesian was asked the same question the response of “Aku malas” [I’m lazy] was sufficient. Therefore even if I gave my response without any mistakes it is still not really Indonesian because an Indonesian would never say that. To be honest I am not entirely sure [what it takes to ‘fit in’]. I feel that I am able to have positive interactions with Indonesian people. I have had to learn to fit in in some small ways. For example I’ve noticed that Indonesian people are keen to hang out quite often (which I discuss in my bicultural resource). Therefore I was a bit surprised when I was continually asked to go places, especially by people who, in my opinion, I didn’t know well enough to ask out. I was also sent messages very late at night (into the am) and very early in the morning (from 6am) and received follow up messages if I didn’t reply. It is very uncomfortable to have to continuously turn down offers but it would probably be uncomfortable also to continually hang out with people who I don’t necessarily know that well. Therefore to fit in it takes sacrifice. You have to acknowledge sometimes you will feel uncomfortable and just try to navigate these situations as best you can.

Justin opens by declaring his credentials as a user of Indonesian through his increasing participation in the Indonesian community. He recounts experiences of using Indonesian, expressing feelings of inadequacy (unfortunately, awkward) and comparing to what he has noticed as an

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

117

Indonesian ‘way’. His experiences in socialising with peers and observing differing norms continue to pose new challenges for him and he recognises the complexity and difficulty of navigating diverse worlds. He feels uncertain about his own development as a bilingual language learner but he seems accepting of a degree of inbetweenness (as best you can) as part of his emergent intercultural identity. Example 2: Emma Emma had studied Introductory Indonesian, had been to Indonesia on a two-week study program, and was studying Law. She considers herself a feminist. Extract 1: Translating/mediating and think aloud Dengan hormat saya berempati dengan situasi Anda. Situasi itu sangat sulit dan Anda harus merasa sakit hati dan dikhianati. Pertama-tama, saya harus menyarankan agar Anda pergi ke akuntan untuk mencari nasihat finansial. Kalau suami Anda tidak terus membayar untuk anak-anak dan Anda, ini penting sekali karena Anda bisa membuat keputusan maklum. Apakah Anda bisa mendukung finansial diri dan anak-anak Anda tanpa gaji suami? Kedua, kalau Anda memikirkan tentang perceraian, Anda harus berkonsultasi dengan ahli hukum. Hak hukum Anda mengandalkan jenis penikahan. Apakah pernikahan Anda yang Islam? Kalau begitu perceraian diberikan oleh pengadilan agama. Akhirnya saya mengusulkan supaya Anda mencari hati Anda. Menjadi ibu rumah tangga dapat memuaskan tetapi hanya kalau Anda sangat ingin menghentikan perkerjaan Anda, lain Anda akan tidak senang. Ini sulit, karena saya mau mengatakan, “Meninggalkan dia!”, tetapi saya tahu status janda yang dianggap buruk dan membawa aib. Walaupun suami Anda berperilaku tidak hormat, saya pikir yang terbaik kalau Anda berbicara dengan dia. Saya harap suami Anda merasa empati dan bersifat minta maaf tetapi jika tidak finansial dan hukum nasihat harus dicari. Translation: Respectfully I empathise with your situation. The situation is really difficult and you must feel sick and despondant. Firstly, I recommend you go and see an accountant to get financial advice. If your husband have to keep paying for your child and you, it’s important that you make an informed decision. Can you support yourself financially and your children without your husband’s income? Secondly if you are thinking about divorce, you should consult a lawyer. Your legal rights depend on the marriage type. Is it an Islamic marriage? If so, divorce has to be given by the religious

118

M. KOHLER

court. Finally, I suggest you follow your heart. Becoming a housewife can be satisfying but only if you want to stop working, otherwise you won’t be happy. This is hard because I want to say ‘Just leave him’ but I know the status of a divorcee is not good and has a stigma. Although your husband has behaved disrespectfully, I think it’s best you talk to him. I hope your husband feels empathy and apologies do you don’t have to seek financial and legal advice.

Emma’s response starts with recognition of her interlocutor’s dilemma and feelings. She draws on the language introduced in the unit and expand this with terms related to her disciplinary knowledge (e.g. ahli hukum - lawyer, hak - rights). She understands the concept of polygamy in legal terms at this point, and her advice reflects assumptions about cultural resources that may be available to women in this kind of situation however she also entertains that there may be other factors to consider in the Indonesian context. She is aware of the limitations of her knowledge (and had actually researched Islamic law to prepare her response). After enacting her professional self, she offers a personal self, advising Zia to follow her heart. This reflects Emma’s enculturation about marriage being based on love, and also her grandmother’s sadness due to experiencing a similar situation. Emma is navigating tensions between her own views and cultural values, and those that she understands are operating in an Indonesian context, and she is aware of and trying to reconcile both. Extract 2: Recount on mosque visit Saya sudah berkunjung ke beberapa mesjid di Indonesia tetapi ini kali pertama ke mesjid di Adelaide. Mas Jono menerangkan bahwa orang Islam bukan teroris menarik sekali untuk saya. Waktu saya di Indonesia„ orang Islam akan sering menjelaskan mereka tidak mendukung terorisme. Ini harus sulit dan penting untuk kepribadian orang Islam, lebih penting daripada pikiran awal saya. Saya sekarang paham kepribadian lebih baik dan saya berempati dengan kegelisahan orang Islam tentang pendapat orang lain. Kami masuk kamar mandi untuk mencuci sebelum bersembahyang dan balkon di atas untuk perempuan. Saya berjuang dengan pemisahan perempuan di Islam karena saya percaya pada persamaan. Perbedaan yang besar di antara mesjid di Indonesia dan Australia ruang untuk perempuan bersembahyang. Ruang perempuan di Mesjid Yogyakarta lebih gelap dan tua daripada ruang untuk laki-laki bersembahyang, yang bagus dan terang. Balkon di mesjid Adelaide lebih baik daripada ruang untuk perempuan

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

119

di Indonesia. Saya masih tidak setuju dengan pemisahan tetapi saya senang kondisi di Mesjid Adelaide lebih baik. Di balkon Mas Jono menyanyi sedikit dari Quran. Saya tidak mengerti nyanyian karena saya tidak bisa mengerti Bahasa Arab tetapi Mas Jono tidak mengerti juga! Dia harus belajar Quran di Bahasa Arab tetapi tidak harus mengerti Bahasa Arab. Saya pikir ini luar biasa dan tidak terpahamkan. Ini menekankan kepentingan Quran untuk agama Islam karena orang Islam tidak harus mengerti Quran, hanya menghafal. Pengalaman saya sedikit mata membuka mata tetapi juga mengkonfirmasi pengetahuan saya. Saya menyenangkan bahwa saya berkunjung mesjid di Adelaide karena ini pengalaman baru untuk saya. Translation: I have visited several mosques in Indonesia but this is the first time I have visited a mosque in Adelaide. Jono’s explanation that Moslems are not terrorists was really interesting. When I was in Indonesia, Moslems often explained that they did not support terrorism. This must be hard and important for individual Moslems, more important than I realized. I now understand the importance and I emphathise with the unease of Moslems about how they are viewed. I struggle with the separation of women in Islam because I believe in equality. The women’s room at the mosque in Yogyakarta was darker and older than the one for men which was good and light. The balcony at the mosque in Adelaide was better than the one in Indonesia. I still don’t agree with the separation but I’m glad that the conditions are better at the mosque in Adelaide. On the balcony Jono sang a little from the Koran. I didn’t understand it because I don’t know Arabic but nor did Jono. He had studied the Koran in Arabic but didn’t understand it. I thought this was extraordinary and unbelievable. This emphasized the importance of the Koran in Islam because Moslems don’t have to understand it, just memorise it. My experience opened my eyes a little but also confirmed my knowledge. I enjoyed the visit to the mosque in Adelaide because it was a new experience for me.

Emma starts her recount by declaring her experiential knowledge of mosques. She compares her experience with those she had in Indonesia, particularly noticing the facilities and space for women. Emma’s language becomes more complex as she expresses her views on gender equality and her discomfort with the gender segregation in Islam. She is surprised and

120

M. KOHLER

perplexed by some Islamic practices such as reciting the Koran without necessarily understanding it, as it challenges her belief in logic and reason. Emma reaffirms her views while acknowledging the value of a new experience in enhancing her understandings; she holds to her position while appearing to remain open to otherness. Emma’s final piece was a ‘Survivial Guide for Indonesian university students’ offering advice on aspects of university life such as friendship, worship and youth culture. Extract 3: Bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection *Kita membuat asumsi tentang “tipikal” budaya Indonesia dari pengalaman pribadi di Indonesia, khususnya berdasarkan biasa kepercayaan agama. Kita paham setiap orang Indonesia tidak menyesuaikan dengan “tipikal” budaya Indonesia. Pubcrawl di Australia pengalaman budaya yang unik tetapi tidak sesuai kecuali kalau kamu mau minum minuman keras. Satu kali per semester, setiap asosiasi mahasiswa dari setiap universitas fakultas mengatur pubcrawl di mana kamu dengan teman dari kuliah bisa membayar baju yang pakai logo dan pergi ke beberapa pub dan tempat minum lain. Baju ini penting sekali karena kamu akan melihat mahasiswa lain dari kuliahmu dan mudah untuk berbicara dengan mereka untuk bertemu teman-teman baru. Di kelompok besar kamu akan berjalan dari pub ke pub. Kalau kamu tidak mau minum alkohol, kamu bisa masih ke pubcrawl tetapi kamu akan harus mentolerir orang mabuk. Kita tidak menyarankan pubcrawl sebagai pengalaman yang terbaik untuk orang Indonesia bertemu dengan orang Australia. Translation: *We make the assumption of ‘typical’ Indonesian culture based on personal experience in Indonesia, especially common religious beliefs. We understand that every Indonesian doesn’t conform to ‘typical’ Indonesian culture. Pubcrawls in Australia are a cultural experience that is unique but not unusual if you want to drink alcohol. Once a semester, every student association from every university faculty organises a pubcrawl where you and friends from your course buy a top with a logo and go to several pubs and other drinking places. The top is very important because you will see other students from your course and it’s easy for you to chat with them and make new friends. In the big group, you will walk from pub to pub. It you don’t want to drink alcohol, you can still go on the pubcrawl but you

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

121

will have to tolerate drunken people. We don’t recommend a pubcrawl as a good experience for Indonesians wanting to meet Australians.

This piece opens with Emma offering a caveat that reflects her awareness of the limitations of generalising cultural groups and norms. She is clearly attuned to these by now, and wants to declare this and demonstrates her knowledge of both generic and differential culture (Risager, 2006). She decentres from her own culture, noting the cultural norms around drinking alcohol, and the discomfort that this may create for Indonesians (We don’t recommend it ). Emma is seeing her own culture more critically, and in mediating it for others, recognizes possible points of dissonance. She has developed a metalanguage in Indonesian for discussing generalisations, and shows mediating strategies such as borrowing cultural terms (e.g. pubcrawl) and explaining unfamiliar practices (e.g. moving from one hotel to another). She weaves in language from previous units such as menyarankan (to advise) and kepercayaaan (belief) applying these in a new context, and showing both her linguistic range and awareness of cultural variability, particularly noting religious diversity. Emma’s final reflection provides a number of insights about her own sense of development: Studying Indonesian has been extremely eye opening for me and has made me analyse Australian culture through a much more critical lens. My language and culture studies of Indonesia, a highly collectivist society with strong identity ties to religion, has really illuminated the individualistic nature of Australian society and made me question what Australian identity, particularly my identity, is based on. I have come to the conclusion, after studying Islam in Indonesia… that my identity is largely based on my political beliefs and personal values that I have drawn from various sources, like my parents, my schooling or feminist thinkers. Before this year, I would have assumed that my identity was much more open to challenge and discussion than a person whose identity is constructed from religion but I really do not think that is true.

This final extract shows Emma’s extended range and control of Indonesian to express the world around her. She provides commentary on cultural norms and practices, suggesting what would be suitable or not, from an Indonesian perspective. Emma is showing that she can navigate alternative perspectives, and decentre from her own culture. Interestingly,

122

M. KOHLER

at the start of her artefact, Emma declares an assumption that she made in creating the resource, reflecting both her awareness of the dangers of generalising, and her capacity to express such insights in Indonesian. She makes connections between terms (collectivist and individualistic) most likely gained through her in-country study experience and her understandings about language and culture. Emma shows an increased level of reflexivity in relation to her language learning and intracultural identity, observing that she is being more analytic and critical in relation to language and culture, including her own. Emma has been able to see alternative perspectives and this has challenged her sense of identity, particularly as a feminist. She recognises her identity as socially and politically situated, and now questions her assumptions about her openmindedness. Emma has developed greater awareness of, and capability to critically reflect on, her own enculturation and is learning to navigate the tensions this raises for her in engaging with Indonesia, and particularly Islam. Furthermore, this response indicates that the rich identity work going on for Emma may have gone unnoticed by her and the teacher if the assessment had not been designed to elicit reflection. Example 3: Jim Jim was the first in his family to attend university and had recently become a father himself. He had studied Introductory Indonesian, had not been to Indonesia, and was studying to become a language teacher. Jim was quite open about his family’s anti-Islamic views. Extract 1: Translating/mediating and think aloud Kelihatan Anda cukup setia dan jujur tetapi suami Anda tidak mencintai Anda. Saya menyarankan supaya Anda dan suami Anda membuat beberapa perubahan tentang situasinya. Pertama-tama suami Anda harus berangkat wanita lain dan meminta maaf kepada Anda. Anda mengatakan ada sulitnya komunikasi dengan suami karena Anda dan suami Anda tidak bertemu sangat sering. Mungkin perlu lebih komunikasi diantara suami Anda dan Anda jadi mungkin sebaiknya Anda tinggal dengan suami atau suami tinggal dengan Anda. Menurut pendapat saya sebaiknya suami Anda menyerahkan kerjanya dan mencari kerja yang dekat di rumahnya dan gajinya sama dengan. Anda sebaiknya hanya menjadi ibu rumah tangga kalau ingin. Kalau hubungan tidak menjadi berhasil Anda bisa mematikan suami Anda. Maaf Bu saya bercanda. Anda mungkin kira situasi ini tidak baik atau buruk, tetapi ada perbedaan antara apa seorang kira yang buruk

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

123

menurut masyarakat Anda, dan apa yang terbaik untuk Anda dan anak-anak Anda. Translation: It’s evident that you are loyal and honest but your husband doesn’t love you. I suggest you and your husband make some changes about the situation. Firstly, your huband must leave the other woman and ask your forgiveness. You say there are communication problems because you don’t see each other often. Maybe you need to communicate more so it’s best you live with your husband or he lives with you. In my view, it’s best if your husband finds work close to home with the same wage. You should only become a housewife if that’s what you want. If your relationship doesn’t improve, you can kill your husband. Sorry, ma’am I’m only joking. You might think this situation is bad, but there’s a difference between what you might think is bad in your society, and what is best for you and your children.

One of the striking features of this response is Jim’s frequent use of the term Anda (formal ‘you’). This reflects the dominance of English in his thinking at this point as personal pronouns are less prominent in Indonesian. He shows little understanding as yet of the tendancy in Indonesian to use passive voice, reducing the emphasis on individuals and their actions. Furthermore, Jim includes a joke in this response – which may be viewed as his larrikin character but also a strategy for dealing with discomfort and uncertainty (Palpacuer-Lee, 2010). Jim’s strong commitment to family is also evident as he suggests the family should try to stay together. His suggestion that the husband find work elsewhere reflects little understanding or experience of working away from home, quite a common practice in Indonesia, and at this stage, he is relying heavily on his own linguistic and cultural norms in interaction. Extract 2: Recount on mosque visit Saya merasa sangat tertarik akan fakta bahwa pengikut Islam membaca kitab suci yang lain karena dapat membantu dia lebih memahami agamanya dan Qur’an. Orang Islam percaya Qur’an adalah kitab suci yang terakhir dan Muhammed nabi terakhir. Selama presentasi beberapa fakta disebutkan misalnya nomor nol dan Algebra diciptakan oleh Moslem. Informasi itu sangat menarik untuk saya karena saya belajar Matematika dan saya tidak tahu di mana asalnya Algebra tetapi sekarang saya tahu. Saya juga mengerti perempuan memakai jilbab atau hijab menunjukkan hormat sendirinya tetapi beberapa perempuan memilih tidak memakai

124

M. KOHLER

jilbab atau hijab dan tidak terpaksa memakai itu. Dia mengatakan waktu pindah ke Australi, dia tidak harus mengubah praktisnya tetapi dia tidak bisa menggunakan pembicara keras pada pagi-pagi karena orang-orang marah pada jam empat pagi. Sesudah, kami pergi ke daerah untuk perempuan bisa berdoa tersendiri dari laki-laki. Akhirnya kami mengatakan terima kasih untuk kemungkinan kita mengunjungi masjid. Hari itu menarik dan saya mempelajari banyak tentang Islam dan berubah pemandangan saya. Translation: I was really interested in the fact that Moslems read other holy books to help understand religion and the Koran more deeply. Moslems believe the Koran is the final holy book and Mohammed is the last apostle. During the presentation several facts were mentioned such as that zero and algebra were invented by Moslems. This was really interested because I studied Maths and I didn’t know the origins of algebra and now I do. I also learned that women wear the headscarf to show self-respect but some women choose not to wear it and are not forced to. He said that when he moved to Australia he didn’t have to change his practices but did have to stop using the loudspeaker, as people get mad at 4am. Afterwards, we went to the area where women pray on their own, separate from men. Finally we said thank you for the opportunity to visit the mosque. The day was interesting and I learned a lot about Islam and changed my views.

In this response, Jim shows development of his language knowledge particularly terms related to religion and Islam. He integrates structures from the unit in formulaic ways (e.g. conjunctions sesudah – after, akhirnya - finally) and some new vocabulary items (e.g. tersendiri - alone, kemungkinan - possibility). His expression remains strongly influenced by English (e.g. berubah pemandangan saya- change my opinion) but is less pronounced than previously. Jim also demonstrates his new Mathematical knowledge acquired through the visit, making connections to his disciplinary identity as a Maths education student. His assumptions about Islam from his upbringing are challenged by his new knowledge about the treatment of women and connections between Islam and other religions. Jim notices Jono’s story of adjustment to Australian society, and shows signs of decentring from his own cultural context (people get mad). Throughout Jim appears curious, and is developing new perspectives and processes for noticing, comparing and reflecting on his own views and enculturation; observing how his views are beginning to change as a result.

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

125

For the culminating assessment, Jim developed an online blog about culturally specific terms that Indonesians would need to navigate life in Australia. Extract 3: Bilingual/intercultural resource and reflection Ada berberapa kata slang di bawah tetapi banyak yang tidak ada di sini dan Anda mungkin mendengar kata-kata lain atau berarti yang beda. Kata slang

Berati

no worries arvo battler big smoke mate dunny grog servo to shout

itu akan baik-baik saja di antara jam satu dan jam lima di sore seorang yang bekerja keras tetapi tidak mampu kota besar seperti Sydney atau Brisbane teman akrab WC alkohol pompa bensin menawar untuk membeli minuman keras untuk semua

‘Outback’ adalah daerah yang di pusat Australi yang tidak dekat kota atau desa dan sangat kering. Tidak ada orang-orang banyak di Outback tetapi ada binatang bermacam-macam milsanya kanguru, ular-ular, emu dan kadal tidur. Daerah terkenal namanya ‘Outback’ meliputi sebagian Australi karena negara terkering di dunia. Translation: There are several slang terms below but many that aren’t here and you might hear other words or different meanings. The ‘Outback’ is an area in central Australia not close to cities or towns, and it’s very dry. There aren’t many people there but lots of types of animals, such as kangaroos, snakes, emus and sleepy lizards. This famous area called ‘The Outback’ covers much of Australia because the country is the driest in the world.

Jim has begun to consider the persective of ‘the other’ a great deal more. He connects this experience to his interview experience in considering the nature of interacting and fitting in when shared cultural meanings cannot be assumed. Jim shows some control in his language use and understanding of the variability of language and meaning, noting that alternative interpretations may be encountered. While some of the

126

M. KOHLER

language items may be considered ‘slang’ or somewhat stereotypic, there are clear attempts being made at mediation with explanatory phrases and statements to unpack meanings in terms such as the ‘outback’. Jim is becoming increasingly aware of the relationship between language and culture, and is applying some strategies for mediating for others in intercultural interaction. Jim’s final reflection indicates awareness of his transformation as a result of his language learning experience: Before starting this assignment, I asked some of my Indonesian friends and they told me a few things that they wished they knew or had found surprising [before coming to Australia]. Having the interview assignment beforehand was a great opportunity for me to gain a new friend and I was able to use some of the answers in the blog. I used the idea of a blog as a way to create a living document that can be changed as I develop my intercultural understanding and can also be viewed by Indonesians or Australians studying the language so it was not just another essay that would be long forgotten after my study is complete and had a greater purpose. This would definitely be a task that I would use in a high school classroom, but I would let it build up and revisit it as the student continued learning through the years to constantly reflect on what they included and what they removed with explanations as to how it shapes their own identity as a multi-language and cultural learner. Myself as a person reflecting on how I was two years ago I can say that I am a completely different person in regards to cultural awareness and my view on the world, and it is learning another language that is the pivot point of my change of view. That naïve 30 year old used to believe that the capital city of Indonesia was Bali! I have also developed a deeper understanding of a country that is very young in regards to a democracy and as such has lead me to question certain points of criticism from the mass media. I would say that this topic has changed me… and I look forward to more discovery and change next year.

Jim’s reflection indicates that is is keenly aware of his own development. He comments on his expanded knowledge, not just of Indonesian language and culture but also of language teaching pedagogy that he plans to use in future; he foresees this knowledge in his future world. He has expanded his linguistic range beyond simple descriptions and opinions to extended descriptions, explanations and reflections. He shows some

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

127

understanding of the dynamic nature of language, culture and intercultural understanding, and is developing his own discourse for expressing this (multi-language and cultural learner). Jim was the only student to reflect back across his entire language learning experience, considering his former self, and noticing his own development particularly his knowledge base and also his sense of self. Jim is abstracting in this final response, comparing his ‘selves’ (then and now) and noting a shift in his identity (It has changed me) as his growth as a communicator and intercultural language learner. The series of assessments and associated extracts from learners revealed evidence of development in intercultural language learning. These learners had increased their conceptual, linguistic and cultural knowledge, of Indonesia and their own. They were more aware of the connections between language and culture, noticing aspects of meaning that were non-transferable or required mediation. Learners were increasingly observant and curious about meanings, noticing differing norms, assumptions and values at work in intercultural exchange. The assessments that proved most powerful, according to the learners themselves, were those where learners experienced some kind of affective impact. Exploring contentious issues such as polygamy, adopting an insider perspective such as through the mosque visit, communicating independently with Indonesian community members, and creating a mediating resource, were experiences that remained with learners and changed them in some way. The reflection processes in particular required learners to stand back from their experiences and develop more abstract understandings that became part of their interpretive framework for future experiences; and this recursive and reflective process was crucial to their development. Furthermore, with each new experience learners became increasingly aware of themselves as language learners and users, and of what it takes to be an intercultural mediator. They expressed a range of affective responses, citing memorable moments and expressing how these had impacted on them. They revealed feelings of bewilderment, embarrassment, discomfort, and uncertainty. The increasing exposure of learners to experiences with members of the Indonesian community proved to not only be memorable but seemed to spur learners on to increase their engagement and participation, both locally and in Indonesia. Despite the challenges of communicating as emerging bilinguals, learners continued to be open to the process, becoming increasingly accustomed to reflecting

128

M. KOHLER

on each experience, and using their reflections to create personal theories and explanations that helped them make sense of ideas, phenomena and experiences. Integrating reflection into the highly valued assessment space, gave increased value and credibility to the affective and reflective aspects of students’ intercultural language learning. Each of them was aware of the challenge of becoming intercultural mediators, and acknowledged that it was effortful; an effort that they recognised would remain with them due to the unfinalisable nature of interculturality and intercultural language learning. Finally, the assessment cycle includes the process of the judging (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013) and giving feedback on learning. Providing feedback is often understood as a process of evaluating the quality of learning and attributing worth to it, and while this is the expectation of the institution and of learners themselves, for me it was also an opportunity for furthering learning. On each assessment, I provided a grade, in-text comments and questions related to the criteria, as well as an overall evaluative comment. My comments often took the form of observations about knowledge gains and areas of strength, for example ‘You are considering the state of your own knowledge about Indonesia, how you might have a particular view and assumptions, and showing sensitivity to the cultural position that you hold’ (Justin). I also noted limitations and areas that needed development with comments such as ‘Your translation has some awkward parts to review… there are a few times when you are too literal and other words are more suitable for carrying meaning’ (Jim). I also provided suggestions for further learning ‘Try to back-translate some items so that you can choose the best fit (see my suggestions of alternate wording) (Emma), and areas for further reflection e.g. ‘I would have loved to hear more from you on [how to mediate your advice as an outsider]’. Often I signaled aspects that would be taken up in class as part of subsequent teaching, showing the importance of feedback for further learning, for example, ‘We will compare translations once we return to class’. My comments were sometimes characterisations of learning intended to give learners a metalanguage and ways of thinking about their learning in order to prompt further reflection. One such example was ‘Notice your assumptions at work here as you interpret the text including knowledge about religion and marriage, and your own values such as loyalty and faithfulness coming through.’ Through this kind of feedback I wanted to stimulate further learning, place value on feedback and show its connections to future episodes of teaching and learning; in an on-going dialogue with learners about their language and culture learning and development.

5

ASSESSING AND EVIDENCING THE DEVELOPMENT …

129

Conclusion This chapter has considered assessment in relation to the development of intercultural language learning, with a particular focus on the processes of eliciting and evidencing. The discussion traced key issues and considerations in assessment of language learning within an intercultural orientation, and the need to shift towards an alternative paradigm of assessment. Adopting a learning-oriented or research view of assessment means viewing it as a kind of experience in its own right, creating affordances for learners to demonstrate as well as continue to develop their learning. The examples outlined show how assessment can be more open, responsive and inclusive of learners’ interpretations, reactions and values, particularly through the integration of reflection. Developing an assessment scheme is important for ensuring that a range of dimensions of intercultural language learning are elicited, not just as a series of episodes but as a set of assessments that can capture the increasing complexity of learners’ development; linguistically, conceptually and of their selfawareness over time. Learners need opportunities to revisit prior learning, make connections of various kinds, problematise and explain their reactions and views, and know that such learning is being valued as integral to their development.

References Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice: Designing and developing useful language tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (2010). Language assessment in practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Deardorff, D. (2011, Spring). Assessing intercultural competence. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.381. Deardorff, D. (2015). Intercultural competence: Mapping the future research agenda. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 3–5. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2015.03.002. Dervin, F. (2010). Assessing intercultural competence in language learning and teaching: A critical review of current efforts in higher education. In F. Dervin & E. Suolema-Salmi (Eds.), New approaches to assessing language and (inter)cultural competences in higher education (pp. 157–174). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

130

M. KOHLER

Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2010). Eliciting the intercultural in foreign language education at school. In A. Paran & L. Sercu (Eds.), Testing the untestable in language education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2020). Assessing intercultural language learning. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 395–410). New York: Routledge. Palpacuer-Lee, C. (2010). Images, discourses, and representations at the art museum: Intercultural openings. Paper presented at the Intercultural Competence Conference. Risager, K. (2006). Language and culture: Global flows and local complexity: Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sercu, L. (2010). Assessing intercultural competence: More questions than answers. In A. Paran & L. Sercu (Eds.), Testing the untestable in language education (pp. 17–34). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Stobart, G., & Gipps, C. (2010). Alternative assessment. In International encyclopedia of education (3rd ed., pp. 202–208): Oxford: Elsevier. Wiggins, G. (1994). Toward more authentic assessment of language performance. In C. R. Hancock (Ed.), Teaching, testing, and assessment: Making the connection, Northeast conference reports (pp. 69–85). Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

CHAPTER 6

Insights and Conclusion

Abstract The final chapter outlines the overall insights from the case study about the development of intercultural language learning and the work of language teachers. The discussion acknowledges the complexity of language teaching within an intercultural orientation, and of considering how learning develops within this. It foregrounds the need to know learners, and design learning programs that are responsive yet also provide a rich, coherent basis for development. The chapter concludes with implications for teacher education and proposes an agenda for collaborative praxis-oriented research using the lived experiences of language teachers and learners to advance understandings of development and intercultural language learning. Keywords Teacher education · Praxis · Collaborative research

In this final chapter I bring together the discussion from the previous chapters to consider the insights that have been gained about developing intercultural language learning and some of the implications of these. I explore what has been learned through the case presented in this book about teachers’ work, learners’ development, and about what needs further investigation. I conclude with a final reflection on the value of attending to development in language teaching and learning within an intercultural orientation. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7_6

131

132

M. KOHLER

Insights About Developing Intercultural Language Learning In bringing the discussion of the case from my own practice to a close, I wish to return to the questions that have remained with me throughout my teaching career, about my role as a language teacher in shaping learners’ language and intercultural development: What are my students learning, and how might my teaching most effectively promote their language learning, and ultimately, who they become? In conducting a study of my own practice and writing this book, I have attempted to gain insights into how language teachers might enable learners to develop their own intercultural outlook such that it becomes part of who they are, how they see the world, and how they interact with others throughout their lives. The case study outlined in this book indicates that developing intercultural language learning is complex. It involves an understanding of language teaching and learning as multi-dimensional and ecological, with multiple affordances and dimensions of language learning occurring within any one episode, and building across multiple episodes or spans of teaching and learning. There is a need to conceptualise a construct of intercultural language learning from the outset in order to consider the dimensions of language learning to be included, and give shape to the scope of teaching and learning across the program. I have proposed a constellation of concepts, language and experiences as a core that can shape the substance of the program and help foster it over time. In addition, it is important to conceptualise development itself and consider how it will be addressed in the program, both in its design and enactment. In my case, I considered a number of characteristics (see Fig. 6.1) that were helpful in complexifying the substance and nature of teaching, learning and assessing over time. The figure uses paired characteristics to show a shift from left to right as a means of increasing demands in learning. The double headed arrow and the ‘both…and…’ label also tries to show that these are not unidirectional and that although complexification can occur when moving from left to right, there is a recursive relationship at work as learning and development are contingent on prior learning. For example, in the case study outlined learners needed to be constantly presented with content, contexts and experiences that were unfamiliar. In a sense, they moved from the familiar to the unfamiliar, but in doing so, the unfamiliar became

6

INSIGHTS AND CONCLUSION

133

Both…

and…

Familiar

Unfamiliar

Private/personal

Public/interpersonal

Concrete

Abstract

Single/discrete

Multiple

Observation

Participation

Mediated

Mediating

Subjective

Self-aware/Critical/reflective stance

Language-and-Culture Content Fig. 6.1 Characteristics for complexifying intercultural language learning

familiar and was integrated into learners’ knowledge frameworks. In addition, they needed texts that were linguistically more sophisticated, and this often coincided with moving from personal domains to more public, informational domains. There needed to be increasingly complex conceptual demands drawn from a range of disciplinary domains, both familiar and unfamiliar, and moving from concrete to more abstract ideas. It was important to increase the number and range of examples that learners had to draw on in relation to perspectives and experiences, recognising that these become a kind of perspectival and experiential bank of meaningmaking resources from which learners can draw and build connections. There was also a need to expand learners’ capabilities to interact in new contexts and roles, moving from being observers to active participants in another language and culture, and becoming increasingly autonomous in the process. Furthermore, learners needed periodic opportunities to critically reflect on their subject positions and consider the impact of their

134

M. KOHLER

learning on them. Finally, the diagram shows that all of these characteristics need to be considered in relation to language and culture content that constitutes the main substance of teaching and learning. These characteristics along with sequencing and connecting mechanisms can create leitmotifs, and recurring emphases across programs that facilitate development. It is particularly through regular reflection of the kind that invites learners to develop more abstract understandings about intercultural language learning, and their own development, that learning becomes transferable and ultimately transformative. These characteristics and mechanisms are not intended to suggest that intercultural language learning can be viewed as developing in a linear or regimented way; quite the opposite. I do propose, however, that development cannot be left to chance, and that there is a crucial role for the language teacher in conceptualising, planning and enacting language programs that can lead to development of intercultural language learning. Language teachers give shape to the goals and scope of learning, selecting concepts, language and experiences to provide a sufficiently rich and engaging program of learning. They create the configuration and sequence of learning, building in connections and increasingly complex demands over time. It is the language teacher whose role it is to know learners, to establish expectations and to foster the culture of language learning that is then co-constructed with learners throughout the program. The teacher’s discourse and intracultural identity are valuable resources that are interwoven in teaching and learning as the program is enacted, and in this way, the language teacher provides an example of ways to act multilingually and interculturally. Language is the teacher’s primary mediating resource in building relationships of various kinds; between language and culture, ideas, experiences and people, in particular episodes and over time. Moreover, when the language teacher holds a learning-oriented understanding of assessment it can enhance the development of intercultural language learning, as elicitation and judgment processes are geared towards further improvement in learning. Finally, the teacher’s stance towards his/her own intracultural and intercultural development, is a powerful influence for learners in modeling processes such as reflexivity that are integral to intercultural language learning as lifelong learning. The process of becoming; of expanding knowledge, recognising diverse perspectives, adjusting to others, and developing awareness of one’s own situatedness were evident in the responses of learners in the case study.

6

INSIGHTS AND CONCLUSION

135

The learners were drawing on their identities and own enculturation throughout the program and bringing these to each new experience. The span of responses, albeit a limited selection, showed that learners were developing increased knowledge, capability to use language for interacting and mediating, and becoming increasingly attuned to subject positions, including their own. They were also able to abstract about their learning and development, becoming more reflective and aware of their changing identities. Their language learning experiences were clearly valuable, but what was also clear from their responses was that experiences on their own are not enough, and that to be truly impactful experiences have to matter! Teachers need to know their learners in order to present them with experiences that are likely to matter to them. Experiences that pose a challenge of some kind, a new concept or perspective, a dilemma or taboo topic, seemed to be the most engaging and most memorable. On these occasions, learners’ responses were riddled with affect including empathy, curiosity, sadness, frustration, disapproval, discomfort and uncertainty. Furthermore, these emotions were not uniform across all learners, indicating that affect plays out differently for different learners (Bigelow, 2019), and highlighting that the development of intercultural language learning cannot be standardized or framed as a common path of progression.

Implications for Developing Intercultural Language Learning The insights from the case study in this book raise a number of implications for those interested in furthering intercultural language learning and development in classroom practice, particularly those working in language teacher education, and research. In relation to language teacher education programs, there are a number of areas for consideration and action. Firstly, there is a need to adopt the notion of ‘stance’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999; Scarino & Liddicoat 2009) in working with language teachers, pre-service and in-service, as this foregrounds the idea of situatedness and suggests the unfinalisability that is a characteristic of both being a language teacher, and an intercultural actor. Teacher education already focuses substantially on knowing the learners, however, there is often limited attention to learners’ linguistic and cultural profiles. This information could be brought from the ‘background’ to the ‘foreground’ and prioritised as crucial to knowing learners’ prior experiences and the resources that they have for

136

M. KOHLER

engaging in (including affectively) and interpreting new experiences. In addition, more needs to be done in teacher education to develop teachers’ understandings of development, and their capabilities to plan for, teach and assess it. This will require a reorientation from an episodic view of language learning to a developmental one, that entails notions of scope, sequence, coherence and complexification of learning. Language teachers need to know how to build connections and weave the tapestry of teaching and learning over time, and examples that show a range of ways of doing this would be particularly worthwhile. Similarly, strengthening language teachers’ assessment understandings and practices is a priority in order to improve ways of eliciting and evidencing intercultural language learning such that it may inform our understandings of it, and how it develops. In conducting this research, I set out to explore how my understandings and actions as a language teacher might enable learners to develop intercultural language learning. The process of self-study has been a valuable one in terms of contributing a detailed case of one language teacher, and for me as that teacher, prompting my own reflection about my intracultural self in my teaching and the limitations of my own knowledge and practices. While the study has provided some insights, it has also raised more questions that could be explored. For example, within an intercultural language learning orientation, how do learners see themselves developing? What kinds of concepts, language and experiences are most influential in learners’ development? What kinds of connections are learners making, over what time, and why? What is the role of reflection and reflexivity in development? What is the role of affect and emotions in development? and how might we theorise intercultural language learning to better accommodate its dynamic and highly individualised and cumulative nature? There is clearly a substantial research agenda that could be undertaken to advance our understandings of the lived experience of teachers and learners in developing intercultural language learning. Self-study, by language teacher-researchers, and through partnerships between researchers and language teachers, could prove particularly helpful for investigating praxis in relation to language teaching, learning and assessment within an intercultural orientation (Poehner & Inbar-Lourie, 2020). Finally, this case study arose out of my own commitment to praxis and my attempt to understand the actions of language teachers, including

6

INSIGHTS AND CONCLUSION

137

myself, through doing and in so doing, to reinform theories of intercultural language teaching and learning. This case study adds to a growing evidence base about interculturally oriented language teaching and learning. While there are inevitably limitations, it has also shown that even within a single year of a sustained interculturally oriented language program, that learners develop their language for intercultural interaction, an awareness about language and culture, and their capabilities to mediate and critically reflect on their own situatedness and identity development. It also shows that one year is only a small contribution to the development that is possible through intercultural language learning, and that this process is on-going, unfinalisable and unique for each learner: There is no common endpoint at which all learners arrive. It is in the variation that strength resides. This variation is a sign of our uniqueness, but is also a stimulus for growth. For after all, …, learners/users of a language actively transform their linguistic world; they do not merely conform to it. And this, we do together. (Larsen-Freeman, 2015, p. 503)

The Future The challenges of the contemporary world have brought greater intensity and complexity to our lives and learning to navigate this will continue to require increasingly sophisticated communication repertoires, practices and ways of being and interacting with others. Developing the capability to participate in diversity, mediate meanings, adapt to others, and change ourselves in the process, is essential now and likely even more so in future; the development of intercultural language learning clearly has a significant role to play in this endeavor.

References Bigelow, M. (2019). Perspectives: (Re)considering the role of emotion in language teaching and learning. The Modern Language Journal, 103, 515– 516. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities, Review in Research in Education, 24, 249– 306, Sage. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2015). Saying what we mean: Making a case for ‘language acquisition’ to become ‘language development’. Language Teaching, 48(4), 491–505. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444814000019.

138

M. KOHLER

Poehner, M. E., & Inbar-Lourie, O. (Eds.). (2020). Toward a reconceptualisation of second language classroom assessment: Praxis and researcher-teacher partnership. Switzerland: Springer. Scarino, A., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2009). Teaching and learning languages: A guide. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation.

References

ACARA. (2011). Shape of the Australian curriculum: Languages. Sydney: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised ed.). New York: Verso. Atkinson, D. (Ed.). (2011). Alternative approaches to second language acqusition. Abingdon: Routledge. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice: Designing and developing useful language tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (2010). Language assessment in practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bennett, J. M., Bennett, M. J., & Allen, W. (2003). Developing intercultural competence in the language classroom. In D. L. Lange & M. Paige (Eds.), Culture as the core: Perspectives on culture in second language learning (pp. 237–270). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Bennett, M. J. (1993). Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R. M. Paige (Ed.), Education for the intercultural experience (pp. 21–72). Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press. Bigelow, M. (2019). Perspectives: (Re)considering the role of emotion in language teaching and learning. The Modern Language Journal, 103, 515– 516. Block, D. (2003). The social turn in second language acquisition. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013). Citizenship, language, and superdiversity: Towards complexity. Language, Identity and Education, 12(3), 193–196. https://doi. org/10.1080/15348458.2013.797276. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7

139

140

REFERENCES

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2007). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 793–828). New York: Wiley. Byram, M. (1995). Intercultural competence and mobility in multinational contexts: A European view. In M. L. Tickoo (Ed.), Language and culture in multilingual societies: Viewpoints and visions (pp. 21–36). Singapore: SEAMO Regional Language Centre. Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflections. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (2010). Linguistic and cultural education for Bildung and citizenship. The Modern Language Journal, 94, 317–321. Byram, M. (2012). Conceptualizing intercultural (communicative) competence and intercultural citizenship. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 85–97). Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Byram, M. (2014a). Twenty-five years on—From cultural studies to intercultural citizenship. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 , 209–225. Byram, M. (2014b). Twenty-five years on—From cultural studies to intercultural citizenship. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 (3), 209–225. Byram, M., & Feng, A. (2004). Culture and language learning: Teaching, research and scholarship. Language Teaching, 37 (3), 149–168. Byram, M., Golubeva, I., Han, H., & Wagner, M. (2017). From principles to practice in education for intercultural citizenship. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the intercultural dimension in language teaching: A practical introduction for teachers. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Byram, M., Holmes, P., & Savvides, N. (2013). Intercultural communicative competence in foreign language education: Questions of theory, practice and research. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 251–253. Byram, M., Nichols, A., & Stephens, D. (2001). Developing intercultural competence in practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., & Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 140– 151. Byram, M., & Zarate, G. (1994). Definitions, objectives and assessment of sociocultural competence. France: Retrieved from Strasbourg. Byrd Clark, J. (2020). Reflexivity and criticality for language and intercultural communication research and practice. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 86– 106). New York: Routledge.

REFERENCES

141

Byrnes, H., Maxim, H. H., & Norris, J. M. (2010). Realizing advanced foreign language writing development in collegiate education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94(Suppl.), 1–235. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review, 2, 1–28. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities, Review in Research in Education, 24, 249– 306, Sage. Cole, M. (1994). A conception of culture for a communication theory of mind. In D. R. Vocate (Ed.), Intrapersonal communication: Different views, different minds (pp. 77–98). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cook, V. J. (1992). Evidence for multicompetence. Language Learning Journal, 42, 557–591. Cook, V. J., & Li Wei. (2016a). The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cook, V. J., & Li Wei (Eds.). (2016b). Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Council of Europe. (2018). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment: Companion volume with new descriptors. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Crozet, C., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2000). Teaching culture as an integrated part of language: Implications for the aims, approaches and pedagogies of language teaching. In A. J. Liddicoat & C. Crozet (Eds.), Teaching languages, teaching cultures. Language Australia: Melbourne. Deardorff, D. (2011, Spring). Assessing intercultural competence. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.381. Deardorff, D. (2015). Intercultural competence: Mapping the future research agenda. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 3–5. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2015.03.002. de Bot, K., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2011). Researching second language development from a dynamic systems theory perspective. In M. Verspoor, K. de Bot, & W. Lowie (Eds.), A dynamic approach to second language development: Methods and techniques (pp. 5–24). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dervin, F. (2010). Assessing intercultural competence in language learning and teaching: A critical review of current efforts in higher education. In F. Dervin & E. Suolema-Salmi (Eds.), New approaches to assessing language and (inter)cultural competences in higher education (pp. 157–174). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Dervin, F. (2017). “I find it odd that people have to highlight other people’s differences - even when there are none”: Experiential learning and interculturality in teacher education. International Review of Education, 86, 87–102. Dornyei, Z. (2001). Motivation to learn a foreign/second language. In Teaching and researching motivation. Harlow, UK: Longman.

142

REFERENCES

Ellis, N. C. (2007). Dynamic systems and SLA: The wood and the trees. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 10(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s1366728906002744. Ellis, N. C., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). Language emergence: Implications for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 27, 558–589. Garcia, O., & Wei, Li. (2015). Translanguaging, bilingualism and bilingual education. In W. E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. García (Eds.), The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (1st ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gelman, S., & Kalish, C. (2007). Conceptual development. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (pp. 687–733). New York: Wiley. Guilherme, M. (2002). Critical citizens for an intercultural world: Foreign language education as cultural politics. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19–25. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education, 5, 93–116. Halliday, M. A. K. (1999). The notion of ‘context’ in language education. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and context in functional linguistics (pp. 1–24). Philadelphia: Benjamins. Harklau, L. (2008). Developing qualitative longitudinal case studies of advanced language learners. In L. Ortega & H. Byrnes (Eds.), The longitudinal study of advanced L2 capacities (pp. 23–35). New York: Routledge. Houghton, S. A. (2013). Making intercultural communicative competence and identity-development visible for assessment purposes in foreign language education. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 311–325. Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jackson, J. (2014). The process of becoming reflexive and intercultural: Navigating study abroad and reentry experience. In J. Byrd Clark & F. Dervin (Eds.), Reflexivity and multimodality in language education: Rethinking multilingualism and interculturality in accelerating, complex and transnational spaces (pp. 43–53). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Kearney, E. (2016). Intercultural learning in modern language education: Expanding meaning-making potentials. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

REFERENCES

143

Kohler, M. (2003). Developing continuity through long term programming. Babel, 38(2), 9–16, 38. Kohler, M. (2015). Teachers as mediators in the foreign language classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kohler, M. (2020). Intercultural language teaching and learning in classroom practice. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 413–426). New York: Routledge. Kohler, M., & Mahnken, P. (2010). The current state of Indonesian language education in Australian schools. Retrieved from Canberra. Kohler, M., & Scarino, A. (2018). Attending to diversities through curriculum design: The case of languages in the Australian curriculum. In A. Reid & D. Price (Eds.), The Australian curriculum: Promises, problems, prospects (pp. 115–126). Melbourne: The Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA). Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (1999). Thirdness: The intercultural stance. In T. Vestergaard (Ed.), Language, culture and identity. Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University Press. Kramsch, C. (2004). The language teacher as go-between. Utbildning & Demokrati, 13(3), 37–60. Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2008). Ecological perspectives on foreign language education. Language Teaching, 41(3), 389–408. Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Kramsch, C. (2012). Theorizing translingual/transcultural competence. In G. S. Levin & A. Phipps (Eds.), Critical and intercultural theory and language pedagogy (pp. 15–31). Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning. Kramsch, C. (2014). Teaching foreign languages in an era of globalization: Introduction. The Modern Language Journal, 98, 296–311. Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics Advance Access, 29, 1–27. Kramsch, C., & Zhang, L. (2018). The multilingual instructor what foreign language teachers say about their experience and why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. E. (2010). Dynamic assessment in the classroom: Vygotskian praxis for second language development. Language Teaching Research, 15(1), 11–33.

144

REFERENCES

Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. New York: Oxford University Press. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2015). Saying what we mean: Making a case for ‘language acquisition’ to become ‘language development’. Language Teaching, 48(4), 491–505. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444814000019. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2016). Classroom-oriented research from a complex systems perspective. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 6(3), 377–393. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leung, C., & Scarino, A. (2016). Reonceptualizing the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 81–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12300-00267902/16/81-95. Levine, G. S. (2020). A human ecological language pedagogy. Modern Language Journal, 104(Suppl.). Levine, G. S., & Phipps, A. (2012). Critical and intercultural theory and language pedagogy. Boston: Heinle, Cengage Learning. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2010). Eliciting the intercultural in foreign language education at school. In A. Paran & L. Sercu (Eds.), Testing the untestable in language education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2020). Assessing intercultural language learning. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (2nd ed., pp. 395–410). New York: Routledge. Liddicoat, A. J., Scarino, A., Papademetre, L., & Kohler, M. (2003). Report on intercultural language learning. Retrieved from Canberra. http://www1.cur riculum.edu.au/nalsas/pdf/intercultural.pdf. Lo Bianco, J., Crozet, C., & Liddicoat, A. J. (1999). Intercultural competence: From language policy to language education. In J. Lo Bianco, C. Crozet, & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), Striving for the third place: Intercultural competence through language education (pp. 1–22). Melbourne: Language Australia. Lo Bianco, J., & Slaughter, Y. (2009). Second languages and Australian schooling. Retrieved from Melbourne. McNamara, T. (2019). Language and subjectivity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moore, K. (2012). Effective instructional strategies: From theory to practice (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nagel, M., & Scholes, L. (2016). Understanding development & learning: Implications for teaching. South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

REFERENCES

145

NCSSFL and ACTFL. (2017). NCSSFL-ACTFL can-do statements. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/ncssflactfl-can-do-statements. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. London: Longman. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. OECD. (2019). Transformative competencies, the organisation for economic co-operation and development learning compass 2030 concept notes. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teachingand-learning/learning/all-concept-notes/. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education. Paavola, S., Lipponen, L., & Hakkarainen, K. (2004). Models of innovative knowledge and three metaphors of learning. Review of Educational Research, 74(4), 557–576. Paige, R. M., Jorstad, H., Siaya, L., Klein, F., & Colby, J. (Eds.). (2003). Culture learning in language education: A review of the literature. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Palpacuer-Lee, C. (2010). Images, discourses, and representations at the art museum: Intercultural openings. Paper presented at the Intercultural Competence Conferece. Passarelli, A. M., & Kolb, D. A. (2012). Using experiential learning theory to promote student learning and development in programs of education abroad. In M. Vande Berg, M. Page, & K. Lou (Eds.), Student learning abroad (pp. 137–161). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Pinnegar, S., & Hamilton, M. L. (2009). Self-study of practice as a genre of qualitative research: Theory, methodology, and practice. New York: Springer. Poehner, M. E., & Inbar-Lourie, O. (Eds.). (2020). Toward a reconceptualisation of second language classroom assessment: Praxis and researcher-teacher partnership. Switzerland: Springer. Porto, M. (2019). Long-term impact of four intercultural citizenship projects in the higher education foreign language classroom. The Language Learning Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2019.1656279. Porto, M., Houghton, S., & Byram, M. (2017). Intercultural citizenship in the (foreign) language classroom. Language Teaching Research (Special Issue), 22, 1–15. Prior, M. T. (2019). Elephants in the room: an ‘affective turn’ or just feeling our way? The Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 516–527. Purpura, J. (2016). Second and foreign language assessment. Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 190–208. Risager, K. (2006). Language and culture: Global flows and local complexity: Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

146

REFERENCES

Risager, K. (2007). Language and culture pedagogy: From a national to a transnational paradigm. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Risager, K. (2011). Research Timeline: The cultural dimensions of language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 44(4), 485–499. Risager, K. (2012). Linguculture and transnationality: The cultural dimensions of language. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication (pp. 101–115). Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Scarino, A. (2009). Assessing intercultural capability in language learning: Some issues. Language Teaching, 42(1), 67–80. Scarino, A. (2010). Assessing intercultural capability in learning languages: A renewed understanding of language, culture, learning and the nature of assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 94(2), 324. Scarino, A. (2014). Learning as reciprocal, interpretive meaning-making. A view from collaborative research into the professional learning of teachers of languages. The Modern Language Journal (Special Issue), 98(1), 386–401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2014.12068.x. Scarino, A., & Liddicoat, A. J. (2009). Teaching and learning languages: A guide. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation. Scarino, A., Kohler, M., & Benedetti, A. (2014). Investigating pedagogies for language-and-culture learning. Retrieved from Adelaide, South Australia. https://www.decd.sa.gov.au/sites/g/files/net691/f/languages_pedago gies_report_final.pdf?v=1466990807. Sercu, L. (2004). Assessing intercultural competence: A framework for systematic test development in foreign language education and beyond. Intercultural Education, 15(1), 73–89. Sercu, L. (2010). Assessing intercultural competence: More questions than answers. In A. Paran & L. Sercu (Eds.), Testing the untestable in language education (pp. 17–34). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27, 4–13. Shohamy, E. (2006). Expanding language. In Language policy. Hidden agendas and new approaches (pp. 5–21). London and New York: Routledge. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. Skehan, P. (1996). A framework for the implementation of task-based instruction. Applied Linguistics, 17 (1), 38–62. Stobart, G., & Gipps, C. (2010). Alternative assessment. In International encyclopedia of education (3rd ed., pp. 202–208): Oxford: Elsevier. Swain, M. (2006). Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Advanced language learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London and New York: Continuum.

REFERENCES

147

Swain, M., Kinnear, P., & Steinman, L. (2015). Sociocultural theory in second language education: An introduction through narratives (2nd ed.). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100(Suppl.), 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301. Van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978a). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the Development of Children, 23(3), 34–41. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978b). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, G. (1994). Toward more authentic assessment of language performance. In C. R. Hancock (Ed.), Teaching, testing, and assessment: Making the connection, Northeast conference reports (pp. 69–85). Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.

Index

A affect, 38, 103, 135, 136 affordances, 23, 30, 62, 92, 102, 129, 132 assessment, 7–9, 24, 57, 60, 101–107, 109–112, 115, 122, 128, 129, 134, 136

C coherence, 77, 90, 99, 136 complexity, 30, 37, 40, 43, 82, 98, 106, 117, 137 concepts, 4, 5, 13, 19, 26, 27, 29, 31, 41, 43, 60, 67, 72–74, 76–78, 86, 132, 134, 136 culminating, 57, 76, 77, 80, 81, 86, 105, 110, 111 curriculum, 7, 9, 19–21, 54, 62, 103

D decentring, 19, 85 development, 2, 5, 8, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 27, 33–38, 40, 41,

43, 45, 53, 54, 57, 62, 63, 67, 80, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 101–105, 110, 112, 116, 117, 121, 126–129, 131, 132, 134–137

E enacting, 9, 13, 28, 54, 56, 92, 98, 112, 118, 134 evidencing, 9, 54, 101, 129 experiences, 5, 7, 9, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27–30, 37–39, 42–45, 54, 56, 58–60, 62, 63, 67, 75–77, 81–86, 89, 93–95, 97, 98, 111, 116, 127, 132, 134–136 experiential learning, 38, 60

I intercultural, 2, 3, 5–9, 13, 18–28, 30–36, 38–40, 43–45, 53–55, 57–60, 62–67, 72, 75–77, 80– 82, 84–86, 89–92, 96, 98, 99,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Kohler, Developing Intercultural Language Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59113-7

149

150

INDEX

101–105, 110–112, 115, 116, 120, 125–127, 129, 131–137 intracultural, 31, 64, 76, 82, 84, 85, 122, 134 K knowledge and knowing, 22, 90, 93 L language, 1, 3, 5–9, 13–18, 20–36, 38–41, 43–46, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62–67, 72–78, 80, 82, 85, 86, 89–94, 96–98, 101–106, 109, 110, 112, 114, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 131–137 learning-oriented, 8, 60, 104, 129, 134 M meaning making, 28, 31, 65 mediation, 6, 9, 15, 20–22, 28, 29, 57, 74, 89, 90, 107, 110, 126, 127 mediator, 76, 81, 85, 98, 116, 122 P personalization, 62, 103, 110 planning, 7–9, 21, 27, 43, 44, 53, 57, 62, 67, 72, 74, 77, 81, 89, 102, 134 positioning, 25 profiling, 24, 59, 60, 62

R recursive, 43, 82, 127 reflection, 6, 8, 19, 23, 31, 32, 38, 39, 64, 65, 76, 85, 90–92, 94, 103–105, 109–111, 115, 116, 120–122, 125–129, 131, 134, 136 reflexivity, 23, 76, 112, 122, 134, 136 representation, 91 resources, 5, 21, 26, 30, 36, 54, 58, 60, 64, 85, 89, 91, 94, 96, 105, 118, 133–135 roles, 5, 15, 23, 25, 57, 64, 75, 81, 85, 96, 98, 110, 133

S scoping, 62 self-study, 55, 56 sequencing, 62, 77 situatedness, 5, 30, 57, 78, 85, 93, 98, 110, 134, 135, 137 stance, 5, 6, 19, 22, 26, 32, 54, 90, 91, 134, 135 subjectivity, 32, 57, 76, 112 symbolic competence, 5, 31, 32

T transformation, 7, 16, 23, 32, 90

U unfinalisable, 128, 137