Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education and Training

Becoming Interculturally Competent

through Education and Training

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LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION

Series Editors: Michael Byram, University of Durham, UK and Alison Phipps, University

of Glasgow, UK

The overall aim of this series is to publish books which will ultimately inform learning

and teaching, but whose primary focus is on the analysis of intercultural relationships,

whether in textual form or in people’s experience. There will also be books which deal

directly with pedagogy, with the relationships between language learning and cultural

learning, between processes inside the classroom and beyond. They will all have in

common a concern with the relationship between language and culture, and the devel￾opment of intercultural communicative competence.

Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be

found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters,

St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

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LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

AND EDUCATION

Series Editors: Michael Byram and Alison Phipps

Becoming Interculturally

Competent through

Education and Training

Edited by

Anwei Feng, Mike Byram and

Mike Fleming

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS

Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Becoming Interculturally Competent Through Education and Training

Edited by Anwei Feng, Mike Byram and Mike Fleming

Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education: 18

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Multicultural education--Case studies. 2. Intercultural communication--Economic

aspects--Case studies. 3. Diversity in the workplace--Case studies. I. Feng, Anwei.

II. Byram, Michael. III. Fleming, Michael

LC1099.B44 2009

370.117–dc22 2009009452

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-163-7 (hbk)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-162-0 (pbk)

Multilingual Matters

UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.

Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

Copyright © 2009 Anwei Feng, Mike Byram, Mike Fleming and the authors of individual

chapters.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any

means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are

natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable

forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy,

preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certifi cation.

The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certifi cation has

been granted to the printer concerned.

Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd., Salisbury, UK

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Group

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v

Contents

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Adrian Holliday

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

Anne Davidson-Lund

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Mike Fleming

Part 1: Investigations of Intercultural Encounters and Learning

1 Cultures of Organisations Meet Ethno-linguistic Cultures:

Narratives in Job Interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Celia Roberts

2 Exporting the Multiple Market Experience and the

SME Intercultural Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Terry Mughan

3 Evolving Intercultural Identity During Living and Studying

Abroad: Five Mexican Women Graduate Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Phyllis Ryan

4 Becoming Interculturally Competent in a Third Space . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Anwei Feng

Part 2: Refl ections on Teaching and Learning Programmes

5 A Critical Perspective on Teaching Intercultural Competence

in a Management Department . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Gavin Jack

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vi Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education

6 Applying the Principles: Instruments for Intercultural

Business Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Barry Tomalin

7 Intercultural Teacher: A Case Study of a Course. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Ulla Lundgren

8 Using ‘Human Global Positioning System’ as a

Navigation Tool to the Hidden Dimension of Culture. . . . . . . . . . . 151

Claudia Finkbeiner

9 Professional Training: Creating Intercultural Space in

Multi-ethnic Workplaces

Catharine Arakelian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

10 The Pragmatics of Intercultural Competence in

Education and Training: A Cross-national Experiment

on ‘Diversity Management’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Manuela Guilherme, Evelyne Glaser and

María del Carmen Mendez Garcia

Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Mike Byram

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

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vii

About the Authors

Catharine Arakelian works as an intercultural educational consultant. She

provides courses for the support of international staff in the National

Health Service. She is currently developing programmes for non-English

speaking staff working with people with dementia in the social care sector.

She has a research degree in Migration Studies from Oxford University.

Mike Byram taught French and German in secondary school and adult

education. At Durham University since 1980, he has researched the educa￾tion of linguistic minorities and foreign language education. He is also an

Adviser to the Council of Europe Language Policy Division. His most

recent book is From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural

Citizenship (2008).

Anwei Feng is Reader in Education in the College of Education, University

of Wales at Bangor. His research interests include intercultural studies,

international education and bilingualism and bilingual education. He has

recently edited Living and Studying Abroad (2006, with M. Byram) and

Bilingual Education in China (2007).

Claudia Finkbeiner is Professor in the School of Modern Languages, at

the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the president of the Association

for Language Awareness. Her fi eld is in applied linguistics with a special

focus on literacy and culture. She has published widely and her latest pub￾lication is (edited with Patricia Schmidt) The ABC’s of Cultural Understanding

and Communication: National and International Adaptations (2006).

Mike Fleming is Professor of Education at the School of Education,

Durham University. His research interests include: drama in education,

particularly drama as a method in the classroom; art and aesthetic educa￾tion and intercultural education. He is a member of working group at the

Council of Europe developing a policy for languages of education.

Evelyne Glaser is Director of the Centre for Business Languages and

Intercultural Communication at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.

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viii Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education

She coordinates the department as well as exchange programmes with 55

partner universities. Her teaching and research focus is on intercultural

communication and applied business languages.

Manuela Guilherme is a researcher in the fi elds of Intercultural Educa tion

and Intercultural Communication for the Centre for Social Studies, Univer￾sity of Coimbra for whom she planned and coordinated two European

projects, namely the INTERACT – Intercultural Active Citizenship

Education (2004–2007) and the ICOPROMO – Intercultural Competence

for Professional Mobility (2003–2006). She is the author of Critical Citizens

for an Intercultural World: Foreign Language Education as Cultural Politics

(2002) and co-editor of Critical Pedagogy: Political Approaches to Language and

Intercultural Communication (2004).

Gavin Jack is Reader in Culture and Consumption at the School of

Management, University of Leicester, UK. His research interests include:

international, cross-cultural and diversity management; postcolonial organi￾sational analysis; communication, language(s) and power in organisations;

anthropological and cultural studies of consumption.

Ulla Lundgren is Senior Lecturer in Education at School of Education and

Communication, Jönköping University, Sweden. She has a research interest

in the intercultural dimension of foreign language education and has

taught in teacher education for many years where among other things she

has developed and worked in interdisciplinary international courses of

Intercultural Encounters.

María del Carmen Méndez García is lecturer in the Departamento de

Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Jaén. She researches in areas including

cultural dimensions in EFL and intercultural communication. She is the

author of Los aspectos socioculturales en los libros de inglés de Bachillerato and

coauthor of Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence.

Terry Mughan is Professor of International Management at Anglia Ruskin

University and has been working in the fi eld of intercultural communica￾tion for 15 years. He was the Founding President of the UK section of

SIETAR, the leading world professional society for inter culturalists. His cur￾rent research interests centre on the role of culture in knowledge transfer.

Celia Roberts is Professor of Applied Linguistics at King’s College

London. Her research interests are in intercultural communication, insti￾tutional discourse and ethnographic method. Her publications include

Language and Discrimination: A Study of Communication in Mutliethnic

Workplaces (1992), Achieving Understanding with Bremer et al. (1996), Talk,

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About the Authors ix

Work and Institutional Order with Sarangi (1999) and Language Learners as

Ethnographers with Byram et al. (2001).

Barry Tomalin is Director of Cultural Training at International House

London, Director of the International House Business Cultural Trainers

Certifi cate and visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster. He is

co-author of The World’s Business Cultures and How to Unlock Them (2007)

and Cultural Awareness (1995).

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xi

Foreword

ADRIAN HOLLIDAY

This new edited collection comes at a time of change which is also refl ected

in the content of the chapters, which represents a full range of activity,

through universities, business and the public sector. The differences and

potential tensions between education and training are not new, but the

way in which they are addressed here is informed by the need for new

thinking and the reassessment of established knowledge about the nature

of culture and what happens between people from different backgrounds.

Several of the authors refer to the new complexities of interculturality cre￾ated by globalization and massive movements of people within and from

outside Europe and the West. An increased awareness of the possibility of

postcolonial and other political factors underlying the cultural realities

which divide us is another theme that emerges. There is reference to the

connection between cultural misunderstanding and race after the Stephen

Lawrence case. It becomes clear in all of the studies in this collection that

in every walk of life, in schools, hospitals, small and large businesses,

organizations, universities and schools, it has become more than simply a

point of effi ciency, but a moral imperative to understand and address

cultural difference – because the cultural realities of people who are

strange to us underpin the very essence of who they are.

The change may be in the complexity of cultural interaction and the

moral and political stakes which underlie it. It may not, however, be a

change in the nature of culture. There are those who argue that cosmopoli￾tanism has been with us for longer than we have imagined, and that the

recent forces of globalization have simply forced us to rediscover the inter￾cultural qualities that have always been there. Recent events such as 9/11

have simply shaken us into new understandings of who we have always

been. We have all always been culturally complex; but we are only recently

beginning to revisit the broader implications of this possibility. The most

important change is therefore in the way in which we look at things.

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xii Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education

In almost every chapter in this collection there is therefore a reassessment

of the models and methodologies for educating, training and describing,

and whether or not we need to have them at all. There has been much

discussion in recent times concerning the problems with stereotypes and

essentialist models of culture. While varying degrees of cultural fi xity are

still projected in current thinking there seems to be a strong movement in

the direction of seeing them as only starting points from which to explore

complexity. Several of the chapters address this and argue either that nov￾ices need the security of safe descriptions from which to venture out, or

that the participants in courses take agendas into their own hands and

overturn them. Is intercultural awareness something new that needs to be

introduced to us gradually by means of a carefully staged programme tak￾ing us from the known to the unknown, or is it something already deep

inside us which needs to be found, expressed and explored?

There is a tendency in the book to move towards the latter view. Indeed,

prevalent throughout the book are the accounts of participants, through

interviews, logs, blogs, chats, evaluations and acts of resistance – oral,

written and observed – which, on the whole seem stronger, richer and

more complex than the models and theories given to them. Ironically it is

the previously uncharted, the people who come from what has been con￾sidered the margins, who have had to struggle most with unrecognized

identities, who take more easily to radical exploration, who are perhaps

the most competent at cultural exploration and negotiation. The ethno￾graphic turn has done much to infl uence this liberation of voice; but some

distance still has to be travelled before means can be found to unleash it

from leading questions and established vocabularies. The need to teach,

structure and secure, whether in education or training may inhibit us from

allowing ethnographies really to speak for themselves.

It is here that the crux of the confl ict between education and training

becomes apparent. In some educational settings there is the freedom to

allow people to explore and perhaps grow beyond the starting models,

theories and questions. On the other side there are an increasing number

of instrumentalities which need to be met. It used to be considered that

only the business world was the victim of the need to model, predict and

secure outcomes. Since Stephen Lawrence and developed sensitivities

regarding equality and diversity, public institutions recognise a moral,

rather than a business imperative, to ensure not just fair treatment, but fair

labelling. Labelling itself has become a diffi cult and dangerous matter.

What some consider the failures of multiculturalism have taught us that

placing people within cultural categories or suggesting types of cultural

behaviour can result in not the intended celebration of difference but

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Foreword xiii

neo-racism. Hence the near impossible dilemma of how to educate (imply￾ing open, expansive refl ection) while ensuring a tightly ethical and disci￾plined outcomes – how to refrain from Othering while defi ning precisely

what it takes to recognise and treat well and effi ciently with the foreign

and the unfamiliar. The dilemma is caught in the sheer complexity of orga￾nizational settings themselves. Several chapters give space to the cultural

complexity of locations, where any notion of the ‘foreign’ culture is sharply

mediated by cultures of organizations, cultures of departments, cultures

of training, cultures of interviewing, cultures of analysis, cultures of the

Other and cultures of politics. At the same time it is very evident in other

chapters that training and business needs to be informed by the broader

explorations gained in education. Indeed, there is little evidence in this

collection of education or training which is not talking to each other.

Canterbury Christ Church University, 2008

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