Intercultural Communicative Competence Theory and Pedagogical Application: Multilingual Learners as Researchers

Cem Alptekin’s article on intercultural communicative competence challenges English as a privileged language. English as a language has remained monolithic as it has also become an international language. Those who are not native speakers as English are considered “privileged insiders” while those nonnative speakers (including those of dialects of English) are considered subaltern. Alptekin’s paper “questions the validity of the pedagogic model whose focus is on native speaker competence in the target language setting” (59). Alptekin asserts that there is no “privileged” or “correct” dialect of English, and that ELT programs that are based on non-inclusive and monocultural views of English as a “privileged language” need to be reformed to reflect the diversity of the speakers of World Englishes, resisting the tradition of using native speaker norms as the preferred outcome of ELT.

While Alptekin makes a strong case for ELT methods to reflect the diversity of speakers of various World Englishes, he doesn’t really give any concrete ways in which ELT methods should be reformed. But he does mention that these methods should not illegitimize learners’ own cultural practices/experiences, even going so far as to say that methods should consider the NL of the learners. And teaching a culturally-stripped version of English is not acceptable to Alptekin. Only methods that recognize the vast diversity of World English as an international language with many variants will suffice.

In Chapter 7 of Hinkel’s text, Joan Kelly Hall posits that, “It is through our everyday engagement in face-to-face interactions that we develop, articulate, and manage our memberships in our communities as well as our interpersonal relationships with one another” (“A Prosaics of interaction: The development of interactional competence in another language,” 138). In other words, the meaningful dialogues we have with others (Hall insists these occurrences/learning practices must be “attended,” meaning the learner is consciously, reflectively engaged in the activity, p. 141) help build our common knowledge about the identities and possible culture(s) associated with the acquisition of a second or other language.

We know that successful participation in a language community is much more than simply learning the mechanics of the language itself; cultural components exist as well through which learners must be able to negotiate their way. We become “experienced participants,” Hall says, when we develop our “interactional competence.” As I was reading, I immediately decided that these cultural components are much like genres, and, indeed, Hall defines them (according to Bakhtinian theory) as  “speech genres” (143). Therefore, as we instruct second-language learners to analyze the written genres of a discourse in a second or other language, we also teach second-language learners to analyze the spoken genres. In order to do this, Hall says that we need to engage in a process of “transgredience,” in which we attempt to reflect and evaluate our participation in various interactive practices as objectively as possible, cognitively reaching outside ourselves to evaluate our own level of success, weakness, and methods of improvement (or better understanding, as how do we measure “improvement”?).

This concept of transgredience reminds me of life-writing theory, in which a writer needs to create a persona or narrator who will reflect upon his/her life in a more objective way than the writer him/herself is able. It is through this created persona that the person’s life is most objectively (and reflectively) viewed. I assert that a study of immigrant narratives (and the implications of culture and language on identity) would yield a similar occurrence to the transgredience in spoken interactive practices.

Classroom approaches based on SLA follows a similar process as written genre analysis, with texts being collected and analyzed (as written texts are in written genre analysis). These texts, Hall explains, are “recurring interactions” that are important to the cultures of the language being learned (leading to learner investment, to borrow Norton’s terminology) and provide “scaffolds” for further learning (144-145). Analysis of these texts includes the setting(s), the participants, the goals/outcomes of the speech acts, the topic(s), the speech acts that make up the overarching act, how participation is conducted, and formulas for how openings, closings, and transitions occur. The students then become researchers, analyzing these speech texts themselves and reflecting on their own participation in them in order to discern how each genre behaves and how to best participate in them. Hall asserts that these activities need to be viewed as just as important as learning the grammar and lexicon of the TL. 

How does this analysis of interactive practices differ from conversational implicatures?

One interactive practice in particular includes requests, which is the focus of Rose’s article (Hinkel’s Chapter 9). And, instead of teaching English as a second language (with the multilingual speakers residing in a country in which English is the primary language), the teachers and students are in Hong Kong, a country in which English is not necessarily English-speaking, but English is a prominent language due to colonization (Rose explains the difficulty of the ESL/EFL dichotomy in a time in which so many World Englishes are in operation and fluctuation).

Whereas Hall’s chapter posits how multilingual learners can serve as researchers, analyzing speech acts, Rose’s chapter asserts that the knowledge gained in pragmatic competence cannot equate to intuition. Furthermore, instructional materials on pragmatics are not available as are ones addressing the English grammatical system. Thus teachers (especially NNSs serving as EFL teachers) have to draw upon their own knowledge and intuition base.

Rose explains that the goal in teaching pragmatics “is not to teach explicitly the various means of, say, performing a given speech act… but, rather, to expose learners to the pragmatic aspects of language…and provide them with the analytical tools they need to arrive at their own generalizations concerning contextually appropriate language use” (171). This indirect instruction is what Rose calls “pragmatic consciousness-raising” (PCR) (171).

I’m wondering if PCR is what Hall was essentially talking about, with the idea that multilingual learners should learn how to analyze genres of speech acts and then use those analyses as scaffolds in subsequent analyses/experiences. This, of course, can be done in the ESL context, where these speech acts associated with the TL are readily available.

In and EFL context, however, this is a more difficult task, as speech acts vary by language and by culture.  Rose explains that PCR involves four basic steps (introduction, familiarization, analysis of data in light of the students’ L1, and transfer of that analysis to the TL, which in EFL cases is English). In this PCR process, though, one common technique (shared by Hall in the article on interactional competence) is that students need to become the researchers. They need to be the ones to study the language. And, in studying the language and speech acts on their own (with guidance from a teacher as necessary or wanted), they become participant-observers, and ethnographers, who are invested in the acquisition of not only the TL but also the accompanying cultural capital.

A few thoughts come to mind as I finish up this chapter and mentally tie it with others we’ve read:

1) Again, how do we bring implicatures into this discussion?

2) Interesting to note is how many times in these chapters the word “motivation” and its derivatives are used to discuss SLA. I’m mentally and literally with my pen inserting the word “investment,” thanks to Bonny Norton.

3) I love how Rose asserts that use of a student’s L1 in the classroom is not necessarily a bad thing. Allowing students to discuss their SLA with their L1 not only gives them more tools for exploration, but it also helps avoid any sort of delegitimizing of the L1 in learning the TL. This is a way in which we can see the connection between the three chapters this week in Hinkel’s text and the Alptekin article, which laid the theoretical call-for-reform groundwork.