Conclusion

Abstract

In this chapter, I first provide a summary of the findings that were presented and discussed in Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, based on the survey about intercultural competence and pragmatics that was given to the modern foreign language teachers. I then address the limitations of the present study. The final section of this chapter focuses on the implications of the research project. In this part, I also present a three-tier representation of intercultural competence components based on the language teachers’ responses to the survey and introduce my model of intercultural competence, based on the results of the study.

9.1 Summary of Findings

9.1.1 Chapter 4: Components of Intercultural Competence

Chapter 4 presented the results of questions 2 and 3 of the survey which focused on the general and linguistic components of IC. Question 2 contained 24 potential components of intercultural competence representing abilities, knowledge, skills and attitudes or characteristics that teachers could choose from. The results revealed that all items suggested as possible components of intercultural competence were selected by several teachers, thus indicating that all of them could feature in a 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%). In terms of links between IC and pragmatics, the item about politeness was selected third most often by participants, while ability to produce situationally appropriate language was in sixth place (out of 24), with 77% of the teachers considering it to be part of IC. This supports the notion of pragmatics as a key component of IC. The high scores awarded by the teachers in the individual language groups further strengthen this view.

Question 3 focused on the linguistic components of intercultural competence and included 12 items, of which five represented speech acts, two addressed aspects of impoliteness, two focused on emotions and three were likely to be treated as related to vocabulary. The results showed that the vast majority of the teachers considered the speech act items to be part of IC: conversational openings and closings (98%), apologies (97%), agreements and disagreements (92%), requests (89%) and complaints (86%). The two impoliteness-related items, impolite and aggressive expressions and swear words and taboo language, were each selected by 70% of the teachers, which again highlights the importance of including pragmatic components in intercultural competence models. This is again supported by the high number of teachers in the individual language groups who considered the pragmatics components to be part of IC.

9.1.2 Chapter 5: Aspects of L2 Teaching in Higher Education

Chapter 5 focused on questions 1, 4, 5 and 6 of the survey, all of which related to various aspects of teaching and had Likert-scale responses. Question 1 featured nine items, predominantly focused on academic skills but also addressing pragmatic and intercultural aspects, and asked teachers to assess the importance of these on a five-point Likert scale. The results revealed that the top three items that were rated as very important by the teachers were general language skills (58%), academic writing skills (55%) and academic reading skills (54%). In addition, these three items were also the only items that were rated as very important by more than half of the teachers. Combining those items that teachers had rated as very important or as important showed that two of the three top items considered to be very important were also among 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. The results of the analysis according to the languages the teachers focused on revealed that, overall, the scores of the individual teacher groups did not tend to differ by more than one point from each other, nor did they differ much from the average score. However, it is important to keep in mind that the individual teacher groups differed considerably in size.

Question 6 asked the teachers to consider the importance of teaching a variety of language aspects and featured 19 items covering pragmatic as well as non-pragmatic aspects of language. The items considered to be very important by the most teachers were situationally appropriate language (62%), followed by everyday life vocabulary (57%), with 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 further supports the notion that pragmatics is a key component of intercultural competence. Combining those items that teachers considered very important and important revealed that the top-ranked items largely remain the same, with the speech act of requests now joining the other speech acts in joint third place: situationally appropriate language (94%), agreeing and disagreeing (92%), followed by everyday life vocabulary (90%), and two pragmatic items, how to ask for something and conversational openings and closings (both 89%). This further highlights teachers’ beliefs in the significance of the pragmatic items for L2 teaching. The results of the language group analyses revealed that the scores of the individual groups did not tend to differ much.

Question 4 asked about the importance that MFL teachers assigned to teaching cultural facts about the places where the language in question is spoken as a native or official language. The question featured 16 items covering a variety of non-linguistic aspects. The results showed that there was only one item that was considered to be very important by more than half of the teachers, namely, different ways of thinking, orientations and values (60%). The next-most-frequent responses were supported by far fewer teachers: literature, art and music (27%) and history (20%). In addition, most of the teachers who did not rate different ways of thinking, orientations and values as very important rated it as important (with a combined rating of 94%). The analysis of the individual language group scores indicated broad agreement regarding the top-ranked item different ways of thinking, orientations and values across all languages. More interestingly, the language group scores indicated quite noticeable differences in the ratings of certain items (e.g., biology and ecology; geography; literature, art and music) based on the language taught by the participant.

Question 5, which asked about the importance of including different types of texts and materials in language classes, comprised 11 items covering a variety of topic areas. The three types of texts and materials 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%). 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 ratings by teachers who taught different languages revealed that the Spanish teachers considered all items to be either important or very important, while the Dutch and Swedish teachers had some of the lowest ratings, bearing in mind that these groups only contained three teachers each; there were relatively few major differences between the rating of different topic areas between teachers of languages that were represented by more than three teachers.

9.1.3 Chapter 6: The Relationship Between Intercultural and Pragmatic Competence

Chapter 6 presented the results of questions 7a and 7b, which explored MFL teachers’ familiarity with pragmatics and how they perceived the connection—if any—between intercultural competence and pragmatic competence. The results of question 7a revealed that the majority of the teachers (68%) said that they were familiar with pragmatic competence, while 18% stated that they were not and 14% selected don’t know. The analysis of MFL teachers’ familiarity with pragmatic competence across the seven language groups showed that there were teachers in all groups that stated that they were familiar with the term. However, the percentage scores of the individual groups differed considerably, with 86% of the Spanish teachers indicating familiarity with the term but only 17% of the French teachers doing the same. However, group sizes need to be taken into consideration and larger-scale studies are needed to obtain more insights into teachers’ conceptualizations of these terms across teachers of different L2s.

Question 7b included a definition of pragmatic competence and asked the teachers how—if at all—they believe that pragmatic competence and intercultural competence are linked. The clear majority of the teachers (86%) considered PC to be part of IC, 4 % considered IC to be part of PC and 2 % saw no link. The results of the language group analysis revealed that all teachers of four groups (German, French, Dutch and Swedish) considered pragmatic competence to be part of intercultural competence, while the clear majority of the remaining groups (English, Italian and Spanish) did likewise. The results of this chapter, therefore, show that the vast majority of the teachers see a link between intercultural and pragmatic competence.

9.1.4 Chapter 7: Intercultural Competence and Gender-Neutral Language

Chapter 7 presented the results of the survey questions 8a–8d, which focused on gender-neutral language. Question 8a examined whether MFL teachers believed that gender-neutral language options existed in the modern foreign languages that they taught. The results revealed that 64% of the teachers stated that these options existed in the language(s) they were teaching, while 25% said they did not, 6% chose don’t know and 5% opted for the other option. The analysis of the seven language groups revealed that members of the individual language groups did not agree on whether gender-neutral language options existed in each specific L2, which was a surprising result.

Those participants who had answered that there were gender-neutral options were then asked about whether they taught these or not, and why. The responses showed that 73% of these teachers taught gender-neutral options, while 18% did not. Teachers teaching these options provided a variety of reasons, such as inclusion, equality, gender-neutral language being part of everyday language use, avoiding negative transfer from learners’ L1, academic language conventions and it being part of the target language’s culture, indicating that these teachers considered gender-neutral language to be linked to intercultural communicative competence and pragmatics.

A third of the teachers who did not teach gender-neutral language stated that they did not do so because they either talked about them in class but did not consider that to be teaching as such, or because gender-neutral options were covered in the materials anyway. Other teachers said that these options were not relevant in the respective language or would distract their learners. Only two teachers explicitly stated that they did not teach gender-neutral options because they disagreed with them; many others were interested in using them. Overall, the findings of the survey questions around gender-neutral language in Chap. 7 showed that this is an area worthy of further discussion in studies that address the interface between pragmatics and intercultural communicative competence.

9.1.5 Chapter 8: Intercultural Competence in Modern Foreign Language Teacher Education

Chapter 8 presented the results of research questions 9a and 9b that addressed whether intercultural competence was a relevant aspect of the MFL teachers’ own educational backgrounds. The responses to question 9a, which asked if teachers had encountered intercultural competence during their own university studies, showed a nearly even split between the teachers that had encountered it (44%) and those that had not (48%). To examine if the age of teachers played a role with regard to question 9a, I examined the data taking the teachers’ ages into account. The results revealed that 60% of teachers aged under 40 had encountered IC during their studies, while 60% of teachers aged 40 or over had not. This suggests a link between coverage of IC in higher education programmes and the publications of key texts by Byram and Fantini in the late 1990s. However, there does not seem to be any link between the language that teachers taught and coverage of IC in their university education.

Question 9b, which asked teachers to indicate whether they associated particular names with IC, showed that the clear majority of the teachers (65%) associated Michael Byram with IC. Other scholars quite associated with IC were Helen Spencer-Oatey, Stella Ting-Toomey, Alvino Fantini, Sandra Savignon and Geert Hofstede. The participants also mentioned 23 other scholars, indicating that the teachers who responded to this question were aware of a range of researchers in this area. Most scholars were known by teachers who taught various different languages, with Byram once again being the most well-known scholar across language groups.

9.2 Limitations

In this section, I would like to address some limitations of the present study. One of the main limitations concerns the number of participants and the languages represented in the study. A higher number of participants teaching a wider variety of different modern foreign languages in different countries would have provided a fuller picture of the views of modern foreign language teachers in higher education. Some of the languages taught were only represented by a very small number of participants—in some cases even just a single teacher. A bigger sample size, with more educators teaching each individual language, would have enabled a contrastive analysis of a higher number of languages. In the present study, the seven MFLs that could sometimes be contrasted were all European languages of either Germanic or Romance origin. Thus, no group insights are available on MFL of other language families or from other parts of the world.

In addition, there are limitations around the survey. To begin with, it was only made available in English. As a consequence, only teachers that had a sufficient proficiency in English to understand and respond to the questions could take part in the study. The questionnaire also did not include an option for participants to leave their email address. While this decision was carefully taken, to ensure that anonymity could be guaranteed, it also meant that participants could not be contacted in order to clarify their answers or conduct a smaller-scale follow-up interview study based on their responses. In addition, certain questions were deliberately not included out of concerns that participants might feel that they could be identified if they provided that information. For example, questions were excluded that concerned the number and type of degrees the participants had and the years in which they completed their degree(s). However, this also meant that information on when participants completed their studies is only available indirectly by looking at the number of years they have been teaching, and the teachers’ responses cannot be related to their level of education or type of degree.

9.3 Implications

9.3.1 Theoretical Implications

The results of the survey have shown that the clear majority of MFL teachers see a link between intercultural competence and pragmatics. Moreover, the majority of the teachers considered the pragmatics components included in questions 3 and 4 (analysed in Chap. 5) to be part of IC. That this view also impacted their opinions regarding the importance of teaching various components of pragmatics was shown in their responses to question 6 (discussed in Chap. 5). Key terms used in the definition of intercultural competence, such as “effective” and “appropriate” language use (Fantini, 1995, 2009), have always suggested a close relationship between pragmatic and intercultural competence, and the results of this study confirm that this view is in fact shared by the majority of teachers who participated here. Before suggesting a possible model of intercultural competence that features pragmatics, I would first like to present an overview in Fig. 9.1 of teachers’ responses to the questions on components of intercultural competence that I suggested in questions 2 and 3, which provides information on the weighting of individual components—that is, which takes account of how many teachers considered each individual component to be part of IC.

Fig. 9.1

Three-tier model of intercultural competence (based on teachers’ ratings)

The model includes all components listed in questions 2 and 3. The components featured in question 2 are presented in regular font, while the specific linguistic components addressed in question 3 are presented in italics. The components were categorized according to headings taken from Fantini’s (2019) model. The three tiers represent the number of teachers who considered the individual components to be part of IC: first tier (more than 66%), second tier (more than 33%) and third tier (10–32%).

The model schematically illustrates that the majority of the components belonging to pragmatics are in the highest tier; for example, all the speech acts, as well as the impoliteness options. This again strengthens the case for considering pragmatics to be of key importance for IC and at the very core of it.

In addition, the model also provides insights on how teachers regard other components of intercultural competence frameworks (see Chap. 3 for details about the frameworks on which the questions were based). It shows that all of the components suggested were considered to be part of IC by at least 10% of the teachers.

Based on previous research on IC (see Chap. 2), and particularly influenced by the models of intercultural competence of Byram (1997, 2021) and Fantini (2019), as well as the results of the present study (including teachers’ responses to questions that addressed their own teaching in Chap. 5 and their views on gender-neutral language in Chap. 7), I would like to propose a model of intercultural competence that places pragmatics in a prominent position next to established major categories, such as attributes/characteristics, skills, knowledge and linguistic competence. This model is presented in Fig. 9.2.

Fig. 9.2

Intercultural competence model

The model is in a circular form indicating that the interplay of the five components is essential for intercultural competence. I also agree with Fantini (2019), Deardorff (2006) and other researchers who consider the development of IC to be a continual process. My model subsumes all linguistic aspects other than pragmatics under the heading of “linguistic competence”, and as such linguistic competence in my conceptualization does not solely refer to structural linguistic elements, such as grammar, but also includes sociolinguistic aspects and issues relevant to competence in specific areas, such as academic language skills. Gender-neutral language use is a potential hybrid between linguistic competence (in the sense that it refers to grammar and vocabulary) but also pragmatic competence (in the sense that not using gender-neutral language can be perceived as offensive and inappropriate; as can using it, in some circumstances).

The skills, attributes and knowledge components mainly feature the subcomponents of questions 2 and 3, also presented in Fig. 9.1.¹ However, in the case of the knowledge components, I have also added in the cultural information components of question 5, as they represent aspects of L2 target country cultural information relevant for interactions with members of the target culture or sojourns in it.

Although my model of IC could be applied to various L2 teaching and learning contexts, it is based on the views of MFL teachers in higher education and therefore also intended to reflect issues particularly relevant to them, such as including components that are relevant for academic exchange programmes or study abroad sojourns.

9.3.2 Methodological Implications

As already mentioned in the limitations, the survey with which the data for this investigation were collected was only available in English. I had decided on an English-only survey after having conducted a study shortly before this one which used both an English and a German version of its questionnaire (Schauer, 2022). Since the aim of this study was to attract teachers teaching a wide variety of modern foreign languages, I was worried that having two language options might give the impression that I was primarily interested in English and German teachers, and therefore deter teachers of other modern foreign languages from taking part. It is difficult to evaluate in retrospect whether this concern was warranted or not. Future research on teachers representing different modern foreign languages may wish to consider translating questionnaires into a variety of different languages in order to make studies more accessible to teachers who do not feel comfortable and confident enough to take part in a study that requires a certain level of proficiency in English.

As also addressed in the limitations, the present study did not feature an option that would have allowed teachers to leave their contact details. Future studies may wish to include such an option, as it would make it possible to contact participants in case of queries or to conduct a follow-up study. In order to ensure anonymity, questions that could potentially make it possible to find out who the individual teachers are were omitted in the present study (e.g., a specific question on the qualifications held by teachers). Future studies may wish to explore if more academic background information can be obtained while still ensuring anonymity for the participants.

9.3.3 Pedagogical Implications

The findings of the study have shown that the majority of MFL teachers working in higher education consider IC to be multifaceted and that they attach high importance to aspects of pragmatic competence. These are very encouraging results. However, the results have also revealed that (a) a number of teachers reported that they had not been exposed to intercultural competence during their studies—even in the lower age groups that would have entered higher education after the publication of seminal articles and books on the topic; (b) not all teachers were familiar with pragmatics; and (c) not all teachers were aware of developments regarding gender-neutral language in the language(s) that they taught.

In view of the position papers on intercultural competence by institutions such as UNESCO (2013) and the Council of Europe (2014), the prevalence of intercultural competence in MFL curricula and the wealth of research publications on the topic, higher educational institutions ought to ensure that they cover aspects of intercultural competence not only in their foreign language instruction programmes but also in their degree programmes that prepare students for future careers in the field of MFL teaching. In addition, individuals in managerial positions in such institutions ought to ensure that not only their teaching staff but also their administrative staff are familiar with intercultural competence and have skills and strategies at their disposal that will enable them to effectively and appropriately communicate with individuals who have other cultural and language backgrounds. This may mean that institutions have to invest in staff training programmes or self-study resources.

Appropriate and effective communication is not only at the heart of intercultural competence, it is also a key tenet in pragmatics. To ensure that teachers can prepare their students for intercultural communication, the teachers themselves need to have a solid foundation in pragmatics and at the very least need to be aware of how the most frequent speech acts are conventionally produced in the target language and what is considered to be polite or impolite in those countries in which the L2 is the official language that are particularly relevant for their students. This means that teachers need to encounter pragmatics during their own higher education studies.

Finally, I believe that teachers ought to keep themselves informed of important linguistic developments in the MFL they are teaching, especially if these developments could impact on their students’ academic success or on how they are perceived. The use of gender-neutral language is one example for such a development in some of the MFLs covered in this study. Even if teachers themselves do not agree with gender-neutral language in modern foreign languages in which they constitute established and expected language use, such as English, they ought to ensure that from a certain proficiency level onwards, their students are aware of the relevant concepts and understand the basics (e.g., the use of they in English as a third person singular pronoun, in cases of unknown or non-binary gender identity). If students are not made aware of these developments, they may get confused about grammar rules, consider established academic writers to lack basic knowledge of grammar and form negative opinions of them, or receive negative feedback on their written work if the masculine form is used as a generic.

As Deardorff (2006) and Fantini (2019) have argued, intercultural competence is not something static but is a process. The same is true of language and culture—both develop and are subject to change. If we want our MFL learners to be able to communicate appropriately and effectively today and in the future, we need to make them aware that cultural norms, values and language use may change. How they react to these changes is up to them, but they ought to be able to make informed decisions about their language use and their conduct in the L2. And to be able to make an informed decision, they need precisely that—information. This is why the role of the MFL educator cannot be overestimated. By equipping their L2 learners with relevant skills, knowledge and information, they can help them become effective and appropriate intercultural communicators and can open up a vast array of opportunities.