Developing intercultural competence in an academic foreign language classroom

Abstract

This paper focuses on the issue of developing intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in a higher education context, with a special focus put on teaching advanced foreign language (FL) students. First, the concept of ICC is discussed on the basis of Byram’s (1997) theory, which is still considered the most comprehensive model for describing the principles of developing and assessing intercultural competence in foreign language teaching. Next, a short overview of studies related to teaching ICC conducted by Polish researchers is presented. This is followed by a description of an Intercultural Communication course designed for university students and conducted by the author of the paper. In this report, the theoretical principles, the main aims of the course along with the techniques applied in teaching and evaluating students are discussed. It is hoped that the paper will be a useful contribution to discussions concerning developing ICC and will stimulate further research in this interesting area of education.