Keywords

4.1 Overview of Terms Associated with Intercultural Competence in the L2

As discussed in Chap. 2, there are many different definitions, conceptualizations and frameworks of intercultural competence. Apart from being discussed in the academic literature on intercultural competence (e.g., Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2006; Fantini, 2019), intercultural competence is frequently referred to in MFL curricula (e.g., KMK, 1996/2013, in Germany; Department of Education and Skills, 2017, in Ireland; Ministry of Education, 2016, in Ontario, Canada) and in government publications on language standards (e.g., KMK, 2003, 2012), as well as in publications by international institutions (e.g.,CoE, 2008, 2014; UNESCO, 2013). In addition, teachers develop their own conceptualizations of intercultural competence based on their own experiences. In order to obtain insights into the role of pragmatics in the conceptualizations of intercultural competence held by the sample of teachers represented in this research project, it is important to first examine how they conceptualize IC.

For this reason, this chapter starts by considering the teachers’ responses to question 2 in the survey, a general question about the components of intercultural competence that not only offers linguistic and pragmatic options but follows a broader approach to include other elements featured in existing IC frameworks. The items included were based on Byram (1997, 2009), Fantini (1995, 2019), Liddicoat and Scarino (2013), Ting-Toomey and Dorjee (2015) and publications by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs in Germany (KMK, 1996/2013, 2003, 2004), as well as including a number of additions of my own.

Figure 4.1 reports on the results of the responses to question 2 and presents the terms that the 133 teachers in this study associated with intercultural competence. The teachers were invited to select as many of the terms as they wished that they considered to be part of intercultural competence. The results are presented according to teachers’ choices (i.e., beginning with the component chosen by the largest number of teachers cascading down to the term chosen by the fewest educators), rather than in their original order in the survey (see the Appendix in Chap. 3 for the original sequence).

Fig. 4.1
A horizontal bar graph of percentage who marked each potential component as being associated with L 2. The percentage is highest for awareness of different ways of thinking, orientations, and values. The percentage is the lowest for efficiency.

Percentage of teachers who marked each potential component as being associated with L2 intercultural competence

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The results show that all items suggested as possible components of intercultural competence were selected by at least some teachers. Efficiency was the component chosen by the fewest teachers (13 teachers, representing 10% of participants), while awareness of different ways of thinking, orientations and values was selected by the highest number (122 teachers, 92%). The items in the second and third places were being understanding and sympathetic when encountering cultural differences (87%) and knowledge of politeness norms (84%).

The top three items are interesting because two of them were also chosen by large number of participants in a study that I conducted with English L2 teachers in primary, secondary and adult education that featured a similar question (Schauer, 2022). In that study, the top three items chosen by the 64 educators were being understanding and sympathetic when encountering cultural differences (94%), openness (88%) and knowledge of politeness norms in the target language (86%). The item in the 2022 study that was equivalent to the top-ranked item in the present study—knowledge of different ways of thinking, orientations and values—was chosen by 83% of the EFL teachers, thus putting it in the fourth place out of 22 items. Interestingly, however, only 74% of the teachers in adult education chose this item compared to 100% of the secondary school teachers and 80% of the primary school educators. A possible explanation for the popularity of this item in the present study could be the slight change in the wording from knowledge (2022) to awareness (present study). Other reasons could include the slightly different participant groups, such as having only teachers of English in 2022, but teachers of a range of modern languages in the present study. As the results of the analysis of question 2 according to languages will show (see Table 4.1), while the top-ranked item in this study was chosen by 100% of some MFL teacher groups (e.g., those focusing on Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish), it was only selected by 91% of the English teachers in this study.

Table 4.1 Percentage of teachers in each language group who selected each potential component as being associated with intercultural competence
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In addition to the second-ranked item, being understanding and sympathetic when encountering cultural differences (87%), components related to attitudes and characteristics were chosen by a large number of the teachers, which supports their inclusion in IC frameworks (e.g., Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2006; Fantini, 2019). The following were selected by at least half of the teachers: adaptability (77%), tolerance (74%), openness (71%), self-reflection (66%), empathy (65%), flexibility (61%), curiosity (54%) and patience (50%). All of these components were also chosen by more than half of the teachers in the 2022 study, thus indicating that they are likely to be considered to be IC components by a large number of MFL teachers.

Regarding the language-related items, the findings reveal that those that are very clearly related to pragmatic concerns rank highly. As mentioned above, knowledge of politeness norms is in third place with 84% and ability to produce situationally appropriate language is in sixth place with 77%. Both items were also frequently selected by the English teachers in the 2022 study (86% chose politeness, while 80% chose appropriate language). This indicates that core pragmatic concerns—that is, situationally appropriate and polite language—are widely considered to be components of intercultural competence by MFL teachers.

Apart from the items that are of a more overt pragmatic nature, those that are perhaps more covert—ability to recognize conflicts and deal with conflicts and knowledge of gender-neutral language forms—were chosen by 58% and 45% of the teachers in the study, respectively. While the item about gender was not included in the 2022 study, that about conflict was chosen by 64% of the English L2 teachers in the 2022 paper. This gives further support to the inclusion of pragmatic aspects as essential components of IC frameworks. It also highlights that diversity aspects such as gender-neutral language ought to receive more attention in IC research and discussions.

Compared to other linguistic items, such as knowledge of recent vocabulary items (30%), correct pronunciation (17%) and grammatical competence (17%), strategies that equip learners with practical skills for handling intercultural encounters, an item that can also refer to language skills, was rated highly (81%). This mirrors the findings from the 2022 study, in which grammar and pronunciation were also chosen by a smaller number of teachers, 16 and 11%, respectively (vocabulary was not included as a possible component), while strategies that equip the learner with practical skills for handling intercultural encounters in the foreign language was also chosen by a considerable number of teachers (70%) in that study. This suggests that structural linguistic elements tend to be less frequently regarded as components of IC, while strategies for handling intercultural encounters (potentially including linguistic ones) are.

Interestingly, the knowledge items that are often addressed in teaching materials—knowledge of celebrations, geography and history and knowledge of political structures and systems—were chosen by less than 50% of the teachers (45% and 31%, respectively). While knowledge of political structures and systems was also chosen by less than 50% of the teachers in the 2022 study (45%), knowledge of celebrations, geography and history was considered to be a component of IC by 64% of the English L2 teachers in that study. Although it could be assumed that this high score may solely relate to the primary and secondary school teachers in the 2022 study—and it is true that 100% of the primary school teachers in the 2022 considered this item to be an IC component—it should be noted that 64% of the teachers in adult education in that survey thought likewise. A possible explanation for the different results could then be sought in the MFL taught, but as Table 4.1 will show, the English teachers in the present study were a teacher group that had one of the lowest scores for this item compared to some of the others, which suggests that this explanation may not be promising in this case either.

However, similarities and differences in teachers’ views on IC components based on the language they are teaching are nevertheless worth exploring, since they can provide insights into how homogenous or heterogenous the views of modern foreign language teachers in the study are. Table 4.1 provides an overview of the intercultural component scores according to the language the teachers focused on when completing the questionnaire.

In the questionnaire, the respondents were asked which languages they were teaching and, if they were teaching more than one language, which MFL they were thinking of when completing the questionnaire (see Sect. 3.1). Table 4.1 includes the data of those teachers that were either teaching a single language or that provided information on which language they were thinking of when completing the questionnaire (where there were at least three teachers of that language): 75 English teachers, 11 German teachers, 10 Italian teachers, seven Spanish teachers, six French teachers, three Dutch teachers and three Swedish teachers. Due to the difference in group sizes and the extremely small number of participants in two of the groups, no statistical analyses were conducted.

Prior to discussing the results, it is important to re-state that the number of teachers representing each individual group varies considerably, with the English teachers in the clear majority and a higher representation of teachers of Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) than Romance languages (Italian, Spanish and French): the data of the 115 teachers discussed here was provided by 92 Germanic language teachers and 23 Romance language teachers. Thus, as is the case in the analyses and discussions that focus solely on the whole group data, it needs to be borne in mind that English in particular and Germanic languages as a whole are represented by a larger number of teachers than the other languages.Footnote 1

The first notable observation is that there is no single item that was chosen by 90% of all groups. Even though the highest-ranked whole group item with 92%, awareness of different ways of thinking, orientations and values, was chosen by 100% of the Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch teachers, it was selected by 91% of the English, 82% of the German and only 67% of the Swedish teachers. This item could suggest that teachers of the three Romance languages might evaluate some components in similar ways, but while the Italian and French percentages are the same in some instances (e.g., 100% for knowledge of politeness norms, compared to 57% of the Spanish teachers) and similar in others (e.g., 90 and 80%, respectively, for openness compared to 43% of the Spanish teachers), there are also instances where the percentage scores of one Romance teacher group is closer to one of the Germanic teacher groups.

For example, knowledge of gender-neutral language forms was considered to be an IC component by 52% of the English teachers, 64% of the German teachers and 50% of the Italian teachers, but only by 33% of the French teachers and 29% of the Spanish teachers. The differences in the perception of diversity aspects with regard to the representation of gender may be due to different societal and political developments of the past 40 years that resulted in a broader acceptance of gender-neutral language in the English-speaking countries (e.g., American Psychological Association, 2020) than appears to be the case in Romance countries (e.g., Erdocia, 2022; Formato, 2018) or in Germany, where although gender-neutral forms were introduced years ago, (far-)right parties are now attempting to prohibit their use. Gender-neutral language will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 7.

When it comes to educators teaching the Germanic languages English and German, the results reveal that these two groups are often similar with regard to the percentage of teachers that selected potential IC components: for example, being understanding and sympathetic when encountering cultural differences was chosen by 85% of the English and by 82% of the German teachers, and patience was chosen by 51 of the English and by 55% of the German teachers. However, there are also items where the percentage scores of the two groups differed considerably; for example, self-reflection was chosen by 63% of the English but by 82% of the German teachers, while knowledge of vocabulary items that appeared in recent years was selected by 35 of the English yet only by 9% of the German teachers. Due to the small number of participants in the Dutch and Swedish teacher groups (three teachers each) not much can be said about them, but it is notable that there are eight potential IC items not chosen by any member of the Dutch group (including adaptability, mindfulness and grammatical competence), while there were only three items which none of the Swedish group selected (knowledge of gender-neutral language forms, grammatical competence and efficiency).

Of the two items that are most clearly related to pragmatic competence, ability to produce situationally appropriate language and knowledge of politeness norms, the language group percentages ranged from 100 (Italian, Dutch) to 67 (Swedish) for the former, and from 100 (Italian, French) to 57 (Spanish), thus always clearly remaining above half of the teachers in each group.

Overall, the results of the analysis of language-based IC components shows that analysing teachers’ views according to the language they are focusing on can provide additional insights that may not be offered by a combined overview analysis reporting on the data of teachers teaching different modern foreign languages. Further studies are needed in this field to shed more light on the connections between the language taught and teachers’ views of intercultural competence components, in particular ones that involve a higher number of modern foreign languages teachers not focused on English and that ideally also have a higher number of teachers in each individual language group included in the study.

The discussion has so far centred on an overview of the IC components representing a wide variety of abilities, attitudes and characteristics, knowledge, and skills. In the following section, I will focus on specific aspects of linguistic IC components that were included in the study to obtain a better understanding of the role of pragmatics in IC.

4.2 Linguistic Components of Intercultural Competence

As stated in Chap. 2, although the link between communicative competence, intercultural competence and pragmatics seems very obvious, since “effective and appropriate language use” is a recurring theme in all three fields, the relationship between pragmatics and IC has rarely been explicitly addressed in well-known frameworks (see also Jackson, 2019; McConachy & Liddicoat, 2022; Schauer, 2022). To explore teachers’ views of the link between core pragmatic components, speech acts and (im)politeness, the third question in the survey, Are the following linguistic aspects part of intercultural competence in your view?, focused largely on pragmatic components, but without including the terms pragmatics or speech acts, as previous research has shown that L2 teachers may not be familiar with these terms (Savvidou & Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2019). This third question featured 12 items, of which five closely correspond to speech acts, listed below with the actual wording of the item in questionnaire followed by terminology used in pragmatics research:

  1. 1.

    Conversational openings and closings (e.g., greetings, how are you questions)—which are either referred to as openings and closings in the pragmatics literature or may be referred to as greetings and leave-takings.

  2. 2.

    How to agree and disagree in the L2—agreements and disagreements,

  3. 3.

    How to apologize in different situations—apologies.

  4. 4.

    How to ask for something (e.g., extension, goods, favours)—requests.

  5. 5.

    How to complain about someone or something—complaints.

In addition to the five speech acts, I also included two items that focused on emotions, worded as expressing positive emotions (e.g., happiness) and expressing negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger). While the latter is more overtly linked to the two impoliteness items that I have included—impolite & aggressive expressions and swear words & taboo language—the former could also be regarded to be a pragmatic item based on its interpretation by the individual teacher (see, e.g., Dewaele, 2015, 2016; Potts & Schwarz, 2008; Rintell, 1984). For example, if expressing positive emotions is considered to refer to complimenting or congratulating someone else, it would firmly place it in the field of pragmatics, as both are speech acts. If, however, the two items are interpreted to solely refer to knowledge of vocabulary, then teachers may not have linked them to pragmatics. Likewise, the second impoliteness item, swear words & taboo language, could also be considered to purely refer to vocabulary knowledge if the impact of the use of such language on other interlocutors is disregarded or if teachers were thinking of instances where a swear word might be used by someone who is alone (e.g., as a result of dropping a cup of tea). Two of the remaining three items in this question are more firmly based in the field of lexis, vocabulary and acronyms and abbreviations, whereas the third, false friends,Footnote 2 could refer to a wide range of linguistic phenomena but is most likely to also be thought of as related to vocabulary.

Figure 4.2 presents the results of the whole group, indicating the percentage of the 133 teachers who chose yes, no and don’t know to the question of whether each linguistic aspect formed part of intercultural competence. The results show that the five speech acts are considered to be IC components by the vast majority of the teachers: conversational openings and closings (98%), apologies (97%), (dis)agreements (92%), requests (89%) and complaints (86%). As was seen in Sect. 4.1, the item chosen by the highest number of teachers in responses to question 2 was selected by only 92% of teachers, and the second-ranked item chosen by 87%, the responses to this question demonstrate a very high degree of agreement among the teachers with regard to the inclusion of pragmatics in IC.

Fig. 4.2
A stacked horizontal bar graph of percentage of teachers who responded yes, no, and don't know. Conversational openings and closings have the highest percentage of yes. False friends have the lowest percentage of yes and highest percentage of don't know.

Percentage of teachers who responded yes, no and don’t know to whether each linguistic aspect is part of intercultural competence

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The two emotion items, the expression of positive and negative emotions, were selected by 84 and 80% of teachers, respectively, thus indicating that they should also be considered IC components. The two impoliteness items, impolite and aggressive expressions and swear words and taboo language, were each selected by 70% of the teachers and thus are also considered to part of IC by a large number of teachers. Although aggressive, impolite and taboo language may not be immediately thought of as important aspects when it comes to IC and the teaching of a MFL, pragmaticians have argued for the teaching of impolite language for years (e.g., Felix-Brasdefer & McKinnon, 2016; House, 2015; Morollón Martí, 2022; Mugford, 2008, 2019). Making L2 learners aware of such language not only ensures a broader understanding of cultural norms with regard to what is considered to be negative or unpleasant in the L2 but also enables MFL learners to make informed decisions regarding their personal safety if they are exposed to such language. Teaching aspects of IC will be addressed in more detail in Chap. 5.

Two of the three items in question 3 that are likely to be perceived as purely lexical—vocabulary and acronyms and abbreviations—were selected as components of intercultural competence by 64 and 50% of teachers, respectively. The final item, false friends, was chosen by 47%. Although well-known ICC models that include linguistic aspects, such as the ones by Byram (1997) and Fantini (2019), feature linguistic components (e.g., “linguistic competence” in the former and “target language proficiency” in the latter), these are not always defined or addressed in great detail and could therefore either remain vague for teachers or attract less attention than some of the other components that are often associated with the respective frameworks, such as Byram’s savoirs. Chapter 8 addresses the teachers’ education and provides information on whether they encountered IC during their own studies and the scholars that they tend to associate with IC; as will be seen there, 44% of teachers encountered IC during their studies and the majority of those associate it with Byram.

In order to examine differences and similarities in teachers’ choices depending on the language on which they focused for this study, the responses were analysed according to language group (see Sect. 4.1 or Table 3.1 for further details). Table 4.2 presents the results of this analysis.

Table 4.2 Percentage of teachers in each language group who selected each potential linguistic aspect as being part of intercultural competence
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The findings show that the item conversational openings and closings was chosen by 100% of German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch and Swedish teachers and by 96% of the English teachers. This indicates that there is a very broad agreement that these two speech acts are part of IC. Interestingly, this is also the only itemFootnote 3 that received agreement scores that are nearly identical across all language groups.

The least chosen component for each of the five language groups represented by more than three teachers—English, German, Italian, Spanish and French—involved items that are likely to be regarded as lexical: vocabulary (German: 55%; Spanish: 29%; French: 33%), acronyms & abbreviations (Italian: 50%), and false friends (English: 44%; German: 55%; Spanish: 29%; French: 33%). As can be seen, three groups (German, Spanish and French) had two items that were weighted equally lowest (i.e., were chosen by the same number of group members). In addition, there were considerable differences in the percentage of group members that chose the least selected item(s), ranging from 55% (German teachers) to 29% (Spanish teachers). However, it needs to be remembered that—as addressed in detail in Sect. 4.1—the number of teachers belonging to the individual groups differs substantially.

Another interesting result is that, compared to Table 4.1 which presented the results of the second survey question about the broader potential list of IC components, even the linguistic components that were considered to be IC components by the lowest number of teachers in any group were still selected by more than the lowest ranking items in Table 4.1: the lowest ranking item in Table 4.1 was efficiency, chosen by 12% of the English teachers, 9% of the German ones and no teachers from the other groups; while the lowest-ranked item in Table 4.2, false friends, was considered to be part of IC by 44% of the English, 55% of the German, 60% of the Italian, 29% of the Spanish, 33 of the French and Dutch and 67% of the Swedish teachers. This further supports the notion that aspects of linguistic competence ought to be prominent components of IC frameworks.

4.3 Summary

This chapter presented the results of questions 2 and 3 of the survey, which focused on the general and linguistic components of IC. While question 2 contained 24 potential components of intercultural competence, representing abilities, knowledge, skills and attitudes or characteristics that teachers could choose from, question 3 concentrated on the linguistic components of intercultural competence and included 12 items representing speech acts, aspects of (im)politeness, emotions and general lexical items.

Section 4.1 presented the results of the second question, which offered a wide variety of different IC options. The findings showed that all items suggested as possible components of intercultural competence were selected by at least some teachers, thus indicating that all of them could feature in an IC framework. The most frequently chosen items were awareness of different ways of thinking, orientations and values (selected by 92% of the teachers), followed by being understanding and sympathetic when encountering cultural differences (87%) and knowledge of politeness norms (84%). The fact that a key component of pragmatics, politeness, was chosen by the third highest number of teachers gives strong support to the inclusion of pragmatic competence as part of IC, especially since the politeness item was also in third place in an earlier study involving 64 teachers of English in primary, secondary and adult education (Schauer, 2022).

The other overtly pragmatics-related item in question 2, ability to produce situationally appropriate language, was in sixth place with 77%, while two items that more indirectly addressed pragmatics, ability to recognize conflicts and deal with conflicts and knowledge of gender-neutral language forms, were chosen by 58% and 45% of the teachers, respectively. Considering the teachers’ choices according to the languages they were teaching, the analysis showed that the pragmatic items ability to produce situationally appropriate language and knowledge of politeness norms revealed a range from 100% (Italian, Dutch) to 67 (Swedish) for the former, and from 100 (Italian, French) to 57 (Spanish) for the latter, each clearly being selected by more than half of the teachers in each language group. Overall, the results emphasize the key role of pragmatics in IC.

Section 4.2 presented the results of question 3, which focused on 12 linguistic items and asked teachers to indicate whether they considered them to be part of IC. Of the 12 items, five referred to speech acts, two referred to the expression of emotions, two addressed impoliteness and three were likely to be identified as vocabulary options. The results showed that the five speech acts were considered to be IC components by the vast majority of the teachers: conversational openings and closings (98%), apologies (97%), (dis)agreements (92%), requests (89%) and complaints (86%). The two impoliteness-related items, impolite and aggressive expressions, and swear words and taboo language, were each chosen by 70% of the teachers, which again underlines the importance of pragmatic competence as an essential component of IC. The individual group scores of the teachers who had indicated that they were thinking of a particular language when completing the questionnaire or were only teaching one language also lends further support to the inclusion of speech acts and (im)politeness in IC frameworks.