Reading With My Eyes Open: Embracing the critical and the personal in language pedagogy

Navigating theory and practice in intercultural language teaching: Challenges faced by a pre-service language teacher in enacting an interpretive perspective in classroom interaction

“…While the flexibility enabled by a postmethod conceptualization of intercultural language teaching is valuable, studies have suggested that its fluidity may also create significant uncertainty and pose challenges to language teachers who are unaccustomed to intercultural language teaching, as well as for pre-service teachers, who have highly limited practical knowledge of teaching (Díaz, 2013;Siregar, 2016). Moreover, although the existing literature does provide some theoretical or practical guidance (Kohler, 2020;Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013;McConachy, 2009;Álvarez Valencia & Michelson, 2022) and empirically theorized examples of researchers and experienced teachers' good practices (Hoff, 2019;Kearney, 2015;McConachy, 2018;Quist, 2013;Svarstad, 2021), it can be highly challenging for less experienced teachers to operationalise theories and realize the vision envisaged by good examples.…”

A text-based approach to developing EFL learners’ intercultural awareness in Higher Education

“…The RaTE is a text-based approach that integrates the principles of ethnography with studying texts for developing interculturality in the language classroom. This approach regards texts as cultural artefacts produced for communicative purposes; thus, studying texts provides ways to engage with others and become intercultural through texts (Quist, 2013). As Hirvela (1996) argues, since text cannot change, the text-and-reader relationship can only come about through alterations in the reader's interpretation and projections.…”

“…This process is similar to the decentering component of ICA as it entails moving away from one's own perspective in order to gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding (Byram, 2021;Cierpisz, 2019). Accordingly, Quist (2013) argues that the reader, similar to an ethnographer, can read a text from an inside perspective and try to understand the wider cultural environment to which the writer intentionally or unintentionally refers. Such an inquiry inevitably entails an outside perspective in which the reader queries, compares, reflects on, and thereby understands his/her own cultural assumptions.…”

“…This model of ethnography-integrated reading aims to analyze the text from surface to depth. Accordingly, learners delve into the text focusing on (1) content, (2) context, (3) genre, (4) structural features, (5) multiple voices in the text, intertextual aspects, (6) and their reflections, responses, and juxtapositions on the ways to write a similar text for a different audience or with a different purpose (Quist, 2013).…”

Moving beyond ‘intercultural competence’: interculturality in the learning of Mandarin in UK universities

“…Comparatively less has been written about these matters from the perspective of learning other languages (but see Choi, 2015;Fay & Davcheva, 2014;McNamara, 2013 for exceptions), or from the position of learners of languages other than English who are themselves located within an Anglophone context (but cf. Quist, 2013). In contrast to these studies of intercultural competence which have gone before, the principal focus of the research on which this paper is based is the learning of Mandarin in the UK university sector, amongst learners whom some recent studies have described as 'cosmopolitan' multilinguals (Block, 2003;Brimm, 2010;Daskalaki, 2012).…”