About the project
Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC): Reflection Tasks
The world language education should enable students to not only become highly proficient in their target language through intensive language study in the host country, but also develop deep intercultural awareness and competence. Language study is essential, but cultivating intercultural understanding and intercultural communicative competence for engagement among future leaders and global citizens is the primary goal of language learning in higher education.
Therefore, this project is to help students foster their interculturality skills. The tasks were designed based on the Interculturality Can-Do Statements (NCSSFL-ACTFL,2017) and the Three Modes of Communication (ACTFL, 2015) in order to relate cultural practices and products to perspectives within or beyond the classroom in a study abroad context.
Objective
1. Learners enhance their intercultural and linguistic competence.
2. Learners prepare themselves to be able to interact with people of other cultures appropriately;
3. Learners enable them to understand and accept people from other cultures by developing their interculturality.
4. Through reflection process, students develop inclusiveness and foster a critical examination of values and attitudes which are the fundamental points of interculturality.
Rationale
Demonstrating interculturality, the ability to actively participate in communication guided by awareness and understanding of cultures , requires the ability to use the language and cultural knowledge, attitudes, and skills in order to interact appropriately in cultural contexts. This project is an integrated approach, which highlights the interplay between language and culture to develop commensurate levels of interculturality.
In light of this, It is necessary for language class to provide both study abroad students in the target countries and students in U.S. Korean programs in higher education settings with a guided intercultural learning tool to reflect on their own progress in intercultural communicative competence that can be implemented before, during, and after the learning period.
Inquire about and understand other cultures’ products, practices, and perspectives facilitates a factual foundation from which stereotypes, prejudice, and misunderstanding can be explained and dispelled. For this reason, it is crucial for learners to withhold judgment when exploring and interpreting cultural products, practices, and perspectives and to be guided to foster developing self-reflection and critical-thinking skills.
Outcomes
- Interpretive Communication: Learners understand linguistic comprehension as well as appropriate “cultural” interpretation of meanings and intentions.
2. Interpersonal Communication: Learners can observe and recognize how their meanings and intentions are communicated by making any necessary adjustments and clarifications accordingly.
3. Presentaional Communication: Learners can create and share messages or meanings to members of the target culture and language. Reflection activities include but are not limited to presentation of speech, audio/audio-visual podcasts, written articles, blogs, essays, and so on.
4. Intercultural Communication: Learners can interact with cultural competence and understanding. Learners can use the language to investigate, explain and reflect on the relationship between the products /practices and perspectives of the culture studies.
Reflection Tasks
There are total of twenty tasks under the ten themes. Each task is designed with a pinpointed title under a specific topic of the theme. The modules function as intercultural learning and reflection inventory. ( Originally developed by A. Lee-Smith (Korean program), Ninghui L. ( Chinese program and H. Nishimura (Japanese program) as a CJK collaborative project for the Yale Center for Language Study (CLS) Fellowship in 2020).
The tasks promote observing, noticing, discovering, inquiring, comparing, considering, thinking, evaluating, recommending, hypothesizing, and applying. In addition, affective elements such as feeling, accepting, respecting, valuing, and appreciating can also play an effective role in the reflection tasks.
Applications
1. Students can monitor their learning experiences and reach their own intercultural goals.
2. The reflection tasks can be used as classroom learning materials for intercultural learning activities, with appropriate modifications for learners’ proficiency levels if necessary.
3. In addition, the set of tasks can be used as guided intercultural learning assignments for study abroad students during their stay abroad.
4. Korean language institutes and programs in Korea may also adapt the materials and assessments in their curriculum for their students and, ideally, Korean teaching colleagues in the U.S. and Korea may initiate collaborative development o f interculturality pedagogy and materials.