Keywords

5.1 Importance of Academic and General Skills and Competences

The first question to which the teachers were asked to respond in the survey focused on their evaluation of the importance of general and academic skills in their teaching: how important is it for you to teach the following skills and competences in L2 language teaching? This question was included with the aim of establishing a baseline on how similar or dissimilar the teaching contexts of the teachers participating in the study were. Based on my experience as a director of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and study skills programme in the United Kingdom, and a director of a language centre in Germany, I anticipated that modern foreign language teachers in higher education everywhere were likely to primarily focus on academic language skills (the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, plus the additional skill of discussing) in their classes. In addition, I was interested in finding out their views on other areas that are not directly related to using the MFL in an academic context, such as general language skills (i.e., the four skills outside of the academic context) and mediation skills. Intercultural aspects were covered by the response item strategies that equip learners with practical skills for handling intercultural encounters, while pragmatics was represented by L2 expressions that can be used to react in an appropriate and sympathetic manner when encountering cultural differences.

Question 1 was answered by 133 participants. Table 5.1 presents the number (and percentage) of teachers who rated each skill or competence on each of the five points on a Likert scale (from 1 very unimportant to 5 very important) or responded with don’t know.

Table 5.1 Teachers’ evaluations of the importance of teaching selected skills and competences in the L2
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The three items considered to be very important by the highest number of teachers were general language skills (58%), followed by academic writing skills (55%) and academic reading skills (54%). The top three items were also the only items that were rated to be very important by more than half of the teachers. This was a surprising finding, as I would have expected the teachers to attach the highest importance to academic skills items. I checked the data to see if the selection of very important for general language skills was related to the level the teachers were teaching (e.g., if this option was primarily selected by teachers working with beginner-level learners and not by teachers working with advanced learners) but there was no link. There was also no connection to the language taught by the teachers, which suggests that much importance is attached to general language skills by modern foreign language teachers in higher education.

The results also show that all items included in question 1 were considered to be important or very important by more than half of the teachers. Figure 5.1 presents for each individual skill or competence the combined percentages of the teachers who considered it important or very important, and thus schematically illustrates the areas rated highly by the teachers.

Fig. 5.1
A horizontal bar chart presents for each individual skill or competence the combined percentages of the teachers who considered it important or very important, and thus schematically illustrates the areas rated highly by the teachers. The skills are, 1. Academic reading skills, 90, 2. General language skills, 89, 3. L 2 expressions, 87, 4. Strategies, 85, 5. Academic writing skills, 85, 6. Academic speaking skills, 83, 7. Academic discussion skills, 79, 8. Academic discussion skills, 74 and Mediation skills, 59.

Percentage of teachers who responded that the teaching of each skill or competence in the L2 was very important or important

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The percentage of those who consider each skill important and very important reveals that when the two highest-rated Likert scale options are combined, the three highest-ranked items change. While academic reading skills (90%) and general language skills (89%) have swapped positions but remain in the top three, academic writing skills (85%) has been replaced by appropriate and sympathetic L2 expressions (87%). This shows that the majority of teachers do not only consider appropriate language to be a part of intercultural competence, as shown in Chap. 4, but that they also consider it important to teach appropriate language in their classrooms; a more detailed analysis and discussion of the pragmatic components that this may refer to is provided in Sect. 5.2, which examines individual linguistic aspects that teachers focus on in their teaching. The combined percentage scores also show that strategies that equip the learner with practical skills for handling intercultural encounters are ranked as important or very important by 85% of the teachers. This suggests that the majority of teachers would like to prepare their students for intercultural encounters and provide them with suitable strategies that will enable them to engage in successful intercultural communication. As in the case of appropriate language, the results concerning skills for intercultural encounters also tie in with the high number of teachers who selected the equivalent item as part of intercultural competence in their response to question 2 (see Sect. 4.1). This suggests a direct link between those components that form part of intercultural competence in teachers’ views and the issues they address in their own classrooms. In the next section, I provide a more detailed analysis and discussion of linguistic aspects that teachers consider to be important in their teaching.

5.2 Importance of Teaching Language Aspects

The results presented in Sect. 4.1, revealed that 84% of the teachers associated knowledge of politeness norms with intercultural competence, and that situationally appropriate language was considered to be part of intercultural competence by 77% of the teachers. When designing the survey, I was interested in exploring which linguistic aspects teachers considered to be important in their own teaching and whether aspects related to intercultural competence and pragmatics would be rated highly by the teachers or not.

Question 6, answered by all 133 participants, asked How important is it for you to teach the following language aspects when teaching a foreign language? Table 5.2 presents the number (and percentage) of teachers who rated each language aspect on each of the five points on a Likert rating scale (from 1 very unimportant to 5 very important) or who responded with don’t know.

Table 5.2 Teachers’ evaluations of the importance of teaching language aspects
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The three items chosen as very important by the highest percentage of teachers were situationally appropriate language (62%), followed by everyday life vocabulary (57%), and the two speech act items conversational openings and closings and how to agree and disagree in joint third place (51%). The items in the top three positions were also the only items that were rated to be very important by more than half of the teachers. This illustrates again that pragmatic aspects are assigned importance by modern foreign language teachers in higher education.

The results further show that—in contrast to the items included in question 1 discussed in Sect. 5.1—not all items included in question 6 were considered to be important or very important by more than half of the teachers: Acronyms and abbreviations approaches half, with 10% of teachers rating them as very important and 39 as important for a total of 49%; while regional vocabulary and swear words and taboo language were considered to be at least important by 44% and 43% of the teachers, respectively. The item the majority of the teachers considered to be very unimportant (22%) or unimportant (31%) was out of use vocabulary.

Figure 5.2 presents the individual items with the combined percentages of the teachers who considered them either important or very important, and thus schematically illustrates the linguistic aspects that were rated highly by the teachers.

Fig. 5.2
A horizontal bar chart presents the individual items with the combined percentages of the teachers who considered them either important or very important, and thus schematically illustrates the linguistic aspects that were rated highly by the teachers. The situationally appropriate language, how to agree and disagree tops the list. Swear words and out of use vocabulary are at the bottom.

Percentage of teachers who responded that the teaching of each language aspect in the L2 was very important or important

Note: Due to the limited space available in the figure, some items had to be reworded here, for example, the item regional vocabulary in this figure was actually “Vocabulary that may only be used in a particular region or country in which the L2 is the official language (e.g., the German “Grüß Gott” [lit. Greet God] in southern Germany and Austria)” in the survey.

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The combined percentage scores show that the top-ranked items that were considered to be very important by the highest percentages of teachers are also in the top three after combining results for very important and important. Situationally appropriate language (which achieved a combined score of 94%) was in first place, followed by how to agree and disagree (93%). In third place is everyday life vocabulary, (90 %), followed by two pragmatic items with 89 per cent each, how to ask for something (i.e., requests) and conversational openings and closings. Thus, four of the five highest-ranked items are related to L2 learners’ pragmatic competence. The remaining speech acts also achieved high combined importance scores: apologies (88%) and complaints (77%).

Regarding items that are part of pragmatics but not based around speech acts, impolite and aggressive expressions were considered to be either important or very important by 56% of the teachers, while swear words and taboo language achieved a combined importance percentage of 43%. These are interesting results, since 70% of the teachers considered these items to be part of intercultural competence, as was shown in Sect. 4.2. Thus, not all items that teachers consider to be part of intercultural competence are also perceived as important when it comes to teaching them.

The two items that focused on expressing positive and negative emotions, which could be part of pragmatic competence, were considered to be important or very important by 75% and 71% of the teachers, respectively. Both items were also considered to be part of intercultural competence (see Sect. 4.2), but in contrast to the aforementioned (im)politeness items, giving learners the means to express their feelings seems to be focused on more in the participants’ classrooms.

Apart from vocabulary relating to everyday life, the non-pragmatic items that received the highest combined percentage scores are grammar (84%), academic vocabulary (80%) and correct pronunciation (78%). This demonstrates that modern foreign language teachers at higher educational institutions also attach importance to structural aspects of language.

To obtain a more detailed picture of the importance that MFL teachers attach to individual linguistic aspects, Table 5.3 presents the scores of the individual language groups, that is, the 115 teachers who were focusing on a specific language when completing the questionnaires (see Sect. 3.1). Since four of the groups contain fewer than eight participants—which is considered to be the minimum number for statistical analysis of ordinal data (see Brunner et al., 2018; Jenkins & Quintana-Ascencio, 2020)—no statistical analysis was conducted.

Table 5.3 Averages of teachers’ evaluations of the importance of teaching individual language aspects, for each language group
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The results reveal that overall, the scores of the individual groups do not tend to differ by more than one point from each other, nor do they differ much from the average score. In the few cases, where the scores of the individual groups differ from another by more than one point, this is likely to be due to the small number of participants in the Dutch and Swedish groups. For example, how to complain had a total group score of 3.96, with Italian teachers assigning the highest group score of 4.6 and Dutch and Swedish teachers scoring it 3.33 and 3.67, respectively. The only instance in which differences in the groups’ ratings are notable with the larger groups is the item regionally variable vocabulary (English: 2.99; German: 4.09; Italian: 3.60; Spanish: 3.43; French: 3.50; Dutch: 1.67; Swedish: 3.00; total group average: 3.19).

This indicates that irrespective of the language they are teaching, modern foreign language teachers in higher education institutions tend to have similar views on the importance of individual linguistic features. The high number of teachers attaching importance to linguistic features that are directly (speech acts, appropriate language, politeness and impoliteness) or indirectly (e.g., expressing emotions) linked to pragmatics further underlines that pragmatic competence is at the core of L2 teaching. This then also supports the findings of Cohen’s (2018) study, which revealed that native and non-native speaker L2 teachers tend to cover a range of pragmatic aspects in their teaching.

This concludes the discussion of linguistic aspects in this chapter. Section 5.3 focuses on non-linguistic components frequently associated with intercultural competence, while Sect. 5.4 addresses the coverage of specific topics that may be associated with intercultural and diversity competence in materials used in the MFL classroom.

5.3 Importance of Teaching Information Pertaining to L2 Countries and Cultures

This section focuses on question 4 of the survey, in which the teachers were asked How important is it for you to teach the following facts/information about the countries and cultures in which the L2 is an official language or native language? The question featured 16 items, involving ideas such as different ways of thinking, the arts, biology and ecology, infrastructure and travel, and wars and conflicts, reflecting the diverse components of culture that were discussed in Sect. 2.2 (e.g., CoE, 2014; Jedynak, 2011; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Sercu, 2000), as well as the knowledge components of intercultural competence frameworks (e.g., Byram, 2021). Table 5.4 presents the results from the 133 participants.

Table 5.4 Teachers’ evaluations of the importance of teaching facts and information about L2 countries and cultures
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The results reveal that there is only one item considered to be very important by more than half of the teachers, namely, different ways of thinking, orientations and values, which was rated as very important by 60% of the teachers. The difference in number to the items in second and third positions, literature, art and music (27%), and history (20%) is striking. Figure 5.3 provides the combined percentage scores of the very important and important ratings by the teachers for the individual items. It illustrates that different ways of thinking, orientations and values is not only the item that received the highest number of very important scores but also the item that received the highest number of combined very important and important scores (94%). This is perhaps not surprising, since the expression “different ways of thinking” is mentioned in the introduction of Byram’s (2009) handbook chapter on communicative competence and in the Council of Europe’s (2012) publication, while “values” feature frequently in Byram’s work (e.g., Byram, 2021) and both “values” and “orientations” are frequently referred to in the publications by the Council of Europe (e.g., CoE, 2012, 2014). Thus, if teachers are looking for literature on the subject of intercultural competence, they are likely to encounter these terms.

Fig. 5.3
A horizontal bar chart presents the percentage of teachers who responded that the teaching of facts relating to L 2 countries and cultures was very important or important. Different ways of thinking, Literature, art and music tops the list while economy and finance, Biology and ecology forms the bottom of the list.

Percentage of teachers who responded that the teaching of facts relating to L2 countries and cultures was very important or important

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The items that were selected by the second and third highest number of teachers as being very important—literature, art and music and history—also rate highly in the analysis combining responses of important and very important, although they now share a joint second place with 71%. This result ties in with Sercu’s (2000, p. 28) definition of culture that distinguishes “small c” and “big C” components and explicitly lists “history, […], literature […] and artistic products” as representatives of big C culture.

Figure 5.3 also shows that nine of the 16 items were considered to be either important or very important by more than half of the teachers, while three (important national symbols and flags, healthcare and medicine and wars and conflicts) approached the halfway mark. While three of the four lowest-ranked items could be regarded to be of relevance to particular learner groups but potentially not all learners (infrastructure and travel, legal system, economy and finance), I was surprised at the low rating for biology and ecology, which received the lowest combined importance and highest combined unimportance scores (21% and 23%, respectively). Given the very notable and widely reported droughts, periods of hot weather and severe weather conditions the world has experienced in recent years and the effects this has had on agriculture, general food supply and water reserves in many countries, I would have expected this item to score more highly. However, perhaps the terms chosen for this item were not sufficiently precise, and a different choice—such as a combination of agriculture, the environment and sustainability—would have led to different results.

An alternative reason that came to mind for the low importance of biology and ecology was that perhaps the language the teachers were teaching could play a role with regard to that rating. For example, if teachers used newspaper articles or streamed news channels in their teaching, this could potentially impact their views on the importance of these issues, especially if they received wide media attention. To explore whether teachers focusing on different languages when they were completing the questionnaire might have had an impact on their ratings, I analysed the data for the respective language groups, and this is presented in Table 5.5. As noted previously, the group sizes differ considerably and therefore no statistical analysis was conducted. In addition, scores from the two groups that consist of only three teachers each (Dutch and Swedish) will not be commented on here if they deviate markedly from the other groups.

Table 5.5 Averages of teachers’ evaluations of the importance of teaching facts and information about the L2 countries and cultures, for each language group
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1 = very unimportant; 2 = unimportant, 3 = neither important nor unimportant, 4 = important, 5 = very important.

The results of the individual teacher groups indicate broad agreement regarding the top-ranked item, different ways of thinking, orientations and values, as the group scores cluster close to the average. However, the group scores also indicate differences in other items based on the language taught. For example, the Italian teachers rated geography more highly than the other groups, 4.40 compared to 3.28 from the English teachers. In the case of literature, art and music, the scores of the English and German teachers differed by more than one point, 3.41 and 4.64, respectively. The scores of the English and Spanish teachers approach a one-point difference in the category of wars and conflict, 3.01 and 4.00, respectively.

It is interesting that the German teachers scored the item biology and ecology the highest, with the rating 3.64, more than one point higher than the French (2.50) and Spanish (2.57) teachers. In order to find out if media coverage of issues related to climate change differed considerably across media in the respective languages or if the term chosen for the item may not have worked well across all languages, additional research would be necessary that explored potential reasons for the rating. This example also illustrates that future large-scale studies that could explore differences in L2 teachers’ views based a variety of different variables would be advantageous, as they could help shed light on differences and similarities in modern foreign language teaching. With items that may be ambiguous, such as biology and ecology, it would be helpful to either conduct pilot studies with individuals representing a variety of L2s, or to ask participants for email addresses in the main study to be able to contact them in order to discuss cases like this.

This concludes the discussion of the importance that teachers assigned to specific areas that could be associated with culture and intercultural competence. In the next section, the focus is on texts and materials.

5.4 Importance of Materials and Texts Covering Specific Topics

This section analyses responses to question 5 of the survey, which focused on materials and texts and asked the teachers How important is it for you to include the following [texts and materials] in your language classes? The question featured 11 items covering issues such as culture shock, study abroad, and diversity. As I noted in Chap. 2 when presenting different definitions for culture, culture is not seen as monolithic but rather as multifaceted, representing values and lived experiences of a very diverse and heterogenous group of individuals (see, e.g., Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; CoE, 2014). In their definition of culture, Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) refer to a number of factors commonly associated with diversity, such as age, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexuality.Footnote 1 Their definition and recent publications addressing diversity issues in foreign language teaching (e.g., Blackburn et al., 2018; Dellenty, 2019; Liddicoat, 2009; Mills & Mustapha, 2015; Paiz, 2020; Pakuła, 2021), as well as my own professional experiences with culture shock and study abroad as director of the EAP Programme at Lancaster, inspired this question. Table 5.6 presents the responses from the 133 participants.

Table 5.6 Teachers’ evaluations of the importance of materials and texts covering specific topics
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The three items considered to be very important by the highest number of teachers were texts addressing study abroad experiences (37%), followed by texts representing the views or experience of individuals with different ethnic backgrounds (31%) and equal representation of texts focusing on males and females (30%). In contrast to the top three items in Sect. 5.3, the top three items in Table 5.6 are relatively close together with regard to their percentage scores. They also suggest that the modern foreign language teachers attach importance to issues that are likely to be highly relevant to their own students’ academic lives, such as study abroad sojourns, as well as issues that are of a broader societal and cultural relevance. To obtain a fuller picture of the items considered to be either very important or important by the teachers, Fig. 5.4 presents the combined percentages of the teachers who scored the individual items with one of these two ratings.

Fig. 5.4
A horizontal bar chart presents the combined percentages of the teachers who scored the individual items with one of these two ratings. Texts study abroad, Texts ethnic backgrounds tops the list while Texts L G B T I Q and Religious beliefs bottoms the list.

Percentage of teachers who responded that materials and texts covering each specific topic was very important or important

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Analysis of the combined very important and important scores shows that—like with the percentage scores in Table 5.6 for the items considered very important—there is relatively little difference between the top-scored items. Two of the top three items according to the very important scores, texts addressing study abroad experiences (77%) and texts representing the views or experience of individuals with different ethnic backgrounds (74%), are also in top positions in the combined importance analysis. The item in third place is different, however, texts addressing the experience of immigrants (68%) which replaced equal representation of texts focusing on males and females in the former top three.

The findings also show that the majority of the questionnaire items for this question were considered to be important or very important by more than half of the teachers. While two items—texts addressing LGBTIQ issues and texts addressing the experiences and views of individuals with different religious beliefs (both 47%)—fall short of the halfway mark, they are close to it. Thus, the findings suggest that the teachers consider it important to expose their MFL learners to a wide variety of texts and materials that present different perspectives and also address a wide range of issues. While equipping L2 learners at university with the necessary language and academic skills needed to navigate the academic context is highly important, the teachers’ scores indicate that they are not restricting themselves to academic topics. Instead, they aim to address broader issues that will enable their students to encounter topics that are of cultural and societal relevance, thereby raising their awareness of issues that they may encounter during sojourns in the target country or in conversations with members of the target culture. Reading these texts may not only raise awareness of specific issues and topics, but is also an opportunity to teach vocabulary items that may not be covered in textbooks at schools but that students may encounter during study abroad sojourns, such as “allergy-free lunch tables”, “mobility aids”, “equal marriage”, “gender-neutral/sensitive language”, “preferred pronouns” or “the Windrush Generation”.

To explore whether teachers focusing on different languages rated the importance of items differently or similarly, the data were again analysed for the individual language groups, as seen in Table 5.7. As in the previous analyses, instances in which the language groups that consisted only of three teachers (Dutch and Swedish) differed considerably from the other groups will not be discussed in detail.

Table 5.7 Averages of teachers’ evaluations of the importance of materials and texts covering specific topics, for each language group
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The most striking finding of this analysis is that the Spanish teachers’ scores indicate that on average they considered all items to be either important or very important, since their lowest score is 4.14 (materials focusing on different age groups) and their highest 4.71, which applies to four different items. The Dutch and Swedish teachers have some of the lowest ratings (e.g., 1.67 for texts addressing the experiences and views of individuals with different religious beliefs in case of the Dutch teachers and the same score for texts addressing LGBTIQ issues in case of the Swedish teachers). However, as mentioned above, it needs to be borne in mind that these groups only comprised three teachers each.

Considering the five languages that were represented by more than three teachers, the data show that there are few instances of those groups’ scores deviating by more than one point. One of these instances concerns the items on different religious beliefs. Here, the English and Italian scores (3.08 and 3.10, respectively) differ markedly from the Spanish score of 4.43. Regarding texts addressing the experience of immigrants, the English (3.61) and French (3.50) scores are markedly lower than those of the Italian (4.50) and Spanish (4.71) teachers. The Spanish teachers also score the item relating to LGBTIQ texts considerably higher (4.57) than the other teacher groups. It would be interesting to explore further why the Spanish teachers felt comparatively strongly about all items in this question. They were an all-female group with varying years of teaching experience, completed their degrees in either Spain or Mexico, represented various age groups and were all teaching outside of a Spanish-speaking country. Thus, the background section of the questionnaire did not yield any insights into why their scores differed from the others. This suggests that, as had been mentioned previously, further studies may benefit from a methodology that allows participants to leave contact details if they are happy to take part in a follow-up investigation in order to explore these issues.

5.5 Summary

This chapter presented the analysis and discussion of questions 1, 4, 5 and 6 of the survey, all of which related to various aspects of teaching. Section 5.1 addressed question 1, which asked teachers to rate the importance of nine skills and competences on a five-point Likert scale. The question featured nine items that predominantly focused on academic skills but also addressed pragmatic and intercultural aspects. The results revealed that the top three items that had been rated as very important by the teachers were general language skills (58%), academic writing skills (55%) and academic reading skills (54%). These top three items were also the only items that were rated to be very important by more than half of the teachers. The combined analysis of the very important and important scores showed that two of the three top items considered to be very important were also in the top three in the combined ranking, namely, academic reading skills (90%) and general language skills (89%), although their order was reversed. The new item in third place was appropriate and sympathetic L2 expressions (87%), highlighting the importance attached to pragmatics by the teachers.

Section 5.2 focused on question 6, which asked How important is it for you to teach the following language aspects when teaching a foreign language? This question included 19 items covering pragmatic as well as non-pragmatic aspects. The three items considered to be very important by the highest percentage of teachers were situationally appropriate language (62%), followed by everyday life vocabulary (57%), and the two speech act items conversational openings and closings and how to agree and disagree in joint third place (51%). These items were also the only items that were rated to be very important by more than half of the teachers. The fact that three of the four items can be categorized as pragmatic again supports the notion that pragmatics is a key component not only of intercultural competence but also of modern foreign language instruction in higher education. The combined very important and important percentage score revealed that the top-ranked items largely remain the same, with the speech act of requests joining the third-placed items: situationally appropriate language (94%), agreeing and disagreeing (92%), and then everyday life vocabulary (90%), followed by two pragmatic items with 89 % each: how to ask for something (i.e., requests) and conversational openings and closings. The combined importance rating of the pragmatic items further underscores their significance for MFL teaching. The results of the language group analyses revealed that, overall, the scores of the individual groups did not tend to differ by more than one point from each other, nor did they differ much from the average score. However, as mentioned throughout, it needs to be acknowledged that the group sizes of the individual teacher groups differed considerably.

Section 5.3 addressed question 4, which asked How important is it for you to teach the following facts/information about the countries and cultures in which the L2 is an official language or native language? The question comprised 16 items covering a variety of non-linguistic aspects. The results revealed that there was only one item that was considered to be very important by more than half of the teachers: different ways of thinking, orientations and values (60%). The difference between this and the items in second and third positions, literature, art and music (27%), and history (20%) was striking. Different ways of thinking, orientations and values was not only the item that received the highest number of very important scores, it is also the item that received the highest number of combined scores (94%). The items ranked second and third highest in the individual very important category remain the same in the combined important and very important category—literature, art and music and history (now sharing a joint second place with 71%). The analysis of the individual teacher group scores indicated broad agreement regarding the top-ranked item different ways of thinking, orientations and values, as the group scores cluster close to the average. However, the group scores also indicated differences depending on the language taught (e.g., in the items biology and ecology, geography and literature, art and music). What is notable about the results in this section, however, is the way that the teachers consistently scored different ways of thinking, orientations and values highly, an item that is closely related to intercultural competence.

Section 5.4 focused on question 5, which asked How important is it for you to include the following [texts and materials] in your language classes? The question contained 11 items covering a variety of content areas. The three items considered to be very important by the highest number of teachers were: texts addressing study abroad experiences (37%), texts representing the views or experience of individuals with different ethnic backgrounds (31%) and equal representation of texts focusing on males and females (30%).Two of the top three items according to the very important scores, texts addressing study abroad experiences (77%) and texts representing the views or experience of individuals with different ethnic backgrounds (74%), are also in first and second place in the combined importance analysis. However, in the combined importance analysis, the item in third place is different: texts addressing the experience of immigrants (68%).

The combined importance scores also showed that the majority of the questionnaire items for this question were considered to be important or very important by more than half of the teachers. The analysis of the language group scores showed that the Spanish teachers considered all items to be either important or very important, with average scores ranging from 4.14 (materials focusing on different age groups) to 4.71 (texts addressing the experience of immigrants). In contrast, the Dutch and Swedish teachers have some of the lowest ratings. However, as mentioned above, the Dutch and Swedish groups each consisted of only three teachers. In the data of the five languages that were represented by more than three teachers, there are few instances of the group scores deviating by more than one point.

This concludes Chap. 5. Chapter 6 focuses on question 7 of the survey, which explicitly addresses the link between intercultural and pragmatic competence.