2020 International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence

Symposium

English

Curriculum design and instruction

This symposium explores how world language instructors effectively integrate intercultural learning into their curricula and establish productive collaboration with intercultural specialists. Through both presentations and activities, it provides examples of best practices for implementing an intentional intercultural perspective in the on-campus, service-learning, and study abroad language curricula.

Paper 1: Interculturalizing the World Languages Curriculum: From Theory to Practice, Tatjana Babic Williams (Purdue University)

The presentation offers a practical model for the redesign of the beginning-level Italian curriculum to include an intentional and systematic intercultural perspective. The model outlines how to select the intercultural outcomes, design intercultural activities, integrate them into the curriculum, and assess students’ intercultural learning.

Paper 2: Integrating Intercultural Competence via Contextualized Activities in World Languages, Annalisa Mosca (Purdue University)

Demonstrating that language study can incorporate intercultural learning outcomes beyond communication, the presenter will focus on creating contextualized content in the target language (Italian) to accompany intercultural learning activities not usually associated with language acquisition.

Paper 3: Intercultural Service Learning for University Student Learners of Japanese, Nagi Fujie (Purdue University)

In a university Japanese service-learning program, students and Japanese community members help each other use their language skills. The presenter will share her analysis of the program with a focus on the development of intercultural sensitivities by student volunteers and will touch on incorporating intercultural training in language service-learning programs.

Paper 4: Increasing Communicative Effectiveness through History: An Intercultural Competence Perspective, Valentina Concu and Jessica Rohr (Purdue University)

This paper examines if and how beginning and intermediate German textbooks use historical topics to promote learners' intercultural competencies. It also explores how the textbook topics can be redesigned by using media and digital tools to improve learners' intercultural communicative competence and awareness of their own and German history.