Autonomous Learning and the Acquisition

of Intercultural Communicative
Competence: Some Implications for
Course Development
Lies Sercu
KULeuven, Faculteit Letteren, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Apart from teaching communicative language competence, foreign-language
educationists also consider it a natural pedagogical aim to encourage learners to have
an interest in, knowledge about and an opening towards foreign cultures, peoples and
countries. This paper outlines some of the key terms and complexities that surround
the advocacy of teaching foreign languages for intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It examines some of the issues involved in reconceptualising courses that
were originally designed to teach communicative competence in a foreign language, to
courses promoting the acquisition of ICC. It discusses criteria for selecting cultural
contents and culture-and-language learning tasks, as well as ways to scaffold the ICC
learning process. It takes issue with traditional culture-teaching approaches and
explains why current societal developments compel us to move away from a
teacher-led language-and-culture pedagogy to a student-centred autonomous learning
approach.

When trying to reconceptualise a course that was originally designed to teach

communicative competence in a foreign language, to a course promoting the
acquisition of intercultural communicative competence, one needs to have a
clear idea about what this new objective is and how it relates to previous course
goals. In what follows intercultural communicative competence will be shown
to incorporate both communicative competence and cultural awareness, and
in that sense to build on commonly accepted goals in foreign-language teaching.
In addition, ICC will be shown to move on from there, in an attempt to meet the
challenges imposed by todays globalising information highway society.

Communicative Competence
The now commonly accepted goal of foreign-language teaching in Europe is
communicative language competence (CC). Communicative language competences have been defined as those competences which empower a person to act
using specifically linguistic means (Council of Europe, 2001: 9) and as comprising several components: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. Each of these
components is postulated as comprising, in particular, knowledge and skills,
and know-how (Council of Europe, 2001: 13).
International cooperation in curriculum development for modern languages
at the level of the Council of Europe has led to the development of a series of planning tools, starting with The Threshold Level (first elaborated by van Ek, 1975,
and subsequently by van Ek & Alexander, 1980) which describes the overall
learning objective in terms of the typical communication tasks that a language
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learner may need to carry out, and the linguistic and other means necessary to do
so. Over the years finer proficiency levels have been specified, and there now
appears to be a consensus on six levels of communicative competence that can
give a comprehensive coverage of the learning space relevant to European
language learners. Each level specifies competence in terms of fluency, flexibility, coherence, precision and range, and in terms of grammatical, lexical, phonological and orthographic accuracy in spoken and written language use (de Jong,
2000). The levels have been called Breakthrough, Waystage, Threshold, Vantage, Effectiveness and Mastery. The first two levels specify what a basic
user should be able to do in the foreign language, the next two what skills
courses designed for the independent user should develop, and the last two
what knowledge and skills a proficient user of the foreign language should
possess.

Cultural Awareness
Apart from teaching communicative competence, foreign-language
educationists have long considered it a natural pedagogical aim to encourage in
learners an interest in, knowledge about and an opening towards foreign
cultures, peoples and countries. Foreign-language teaching always includes at
least two languages and cultures, namely the learners own culture and language
on the one hand and a foreign culture and language on the other. Therefore, it
seems natural to try and raise awareness in learners of the fact that people speaking other languages may also organise and perceive the world in ways different
from their own.
The way in which cultural awareness raising has been undertaken has
evolved over the years (Byram, 1989; Kramsch, 1993; Risager, 2000). The
increased possibilities of travel to foreign countries and the increasingly multicultural character of many societies has made the prospect of face-to-face
communication with interlocutors speaking the foreign language and displaying different cultural behaviours a more realistic prospect. Making cultural
differences known to learners was a natural thing to do in foreign language
courses that aimed at attaining native-speaker competence in the foreign
language. A (near)native competence would allow a foreigner to submerge in the
foreign culture and not be recognised as such. Increasing learners familiarity
with the target culture through Landeskunde, civilisation or cultural studies teaching was considered to contribute to the attainment of that same goal. To date the
teaching of culture largely consists in the passing on of information regarding
various dimensions of the target culture, such as geography, education, food and
drink, tourist highlights, politics, the economy, etc.

Intercultural Communicative Competence

As pointed out before, the concept of intercultural communicative competence builds on but is not identical to communicative competence plus cultural
awareness. Intercultural competence is a concept typical of postmodernist
views of society, with their interest in cultural difference and the relationship to
the Other, no matter whether this Other is different from a national, ethnic,
social, regional, professional or institutional point of view. All encounters

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63

always encompass interactions between the multiple identities of social actors

and their perceptions of each others identities. They are therefore always
intercultural. Individuals are continually crossing cultural borders (Giroux,
1992). They are in a constant process of becoming as well as being (Hall, 1990:
225).
The notion of intercultural communicative competence in foreign-language
education reflects postmodernist views on identity. Byram and Zarate (1997)
define an interculturally competent person as someone who can cross borders
and can mediate between two or more cultural identities. The intercultural
speaker is not a cosmopolitan being who floats over cultures, much like tourists
tend to do. Rather, he or she is committed to turning intercultural encounters into
intercultural relationships. He or she is not satisfied with a view from the outside,
with marvelling at differences and at what seems exotic and intriguing about
another culture. An intercultural speaker is determined to understand, to gain an
inside view of the other persons culture, and at the same time to contribute to the
other persons understanding of his or her own culture from an insiders point of
view.
Thus, becoming an interculturally competent user of a foreign language not
only involves the acquisition of communicative competence in that language. It
also involves the acquisition of particular skills, attitudes, values, knowledge
items and ways of looking upon the world. The knowledge, skills and attitudes
which together make up intercultural competence have been organised in a
conceptual framework comprising five savoirs. As can be seen from Figure 1,
these five savoirs should not be considered as isolated components, but rather as
components that are integrated and intertwined with the various dimensions of
communicative competence. Communicative competence itself can in fact be
considered a sixth savoir, namely savoir communiquer.
The first savoir, savoirs with a plural s, can be said to constitute the knowledge
dimension of the conceptual framework. It has been defined as a system of
cultural references which structures the implicit and explicit knowledge of a
culture (Byram & Zarate, 1994). These savoirs together constitute the frame of
reference of the people living (in) a particular culture. The words and gestures
which people use, the behaviours they display, the values they believe in, the
symbols they cherish, etc. are always culture-bound and carry meaning within a
particular cultural frame of reference. Therefore, in intercultural communication
it is important to always be sensitive to potential referential differences.
Savoir-apprendre and savoir-comprendre together constitute the skills dimension of the conceptual framework. Savoir-apprendre refers to the capacity to learn
cultures and assign meaning to cultural phenomena in an independent way.
Savoir-apprendre is related to savoir-comprendre, and refers to the capacity to interpret and relate cultures. These two savoirs are clearly in line with the answers that
theorists of education have formulated in response to the changing and expanding nature of the world in which people will need the knowledge, skills (and attitudes) to continue learning throughout their lifetimes. Thus, the terms reflect
constructivist theories of autonomous learning, as they have been formulated in,
for example, Scardamalia and Bereiter (1991, 1994), Wood and Wood (1996) or
Richardson (1997).
Savoir-faire refers to the overall ability to act in an interculturally competent

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Figure 1 Dimensions of intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997: 34)

way in intercultural contact situations, to take into account the specific cultural
identity of ones interlocutor and to act in a respectful and cooperative way.
Savoir-tre and savoir-sengager are best considered together since they refer to
a general disposition that is characterised by a critical engagement with the
foreign culture under consideration and ones own (savoir-sengager) (Byram,
1997: 54) and the capacity and willingness to abandon ethnocentric attitudes and
perceptions and the ability to establish and maintain a relationship between
ones own and the foreign culture (savoir-tre).

Planning ICC Language Courses

As pointed out, a planning instrument for designing and organising language
courses has been developed by the Council of Europes Modern Languages
Project, identifying the knowledge and skills required to reach each of the six
levels of communicative proficiency (Council of Europe, 2001: 2142). With
respect to how to organise and scaffold the teaching of intercultural competence,
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is far less explicit. On
pages 101108 it does list and explain what general competences will contribute in one way or another to the language users ability to communicate (p. 101),
distinguishing between declarative knowledge (savoir), skills and know-how
(savoir-faire), existential competence (savoir-tre) and the ability to learn

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65

(savoir-apprendre). It does, however, fail to demonstrate how course developers could proceed if they wanted to design materials which aim to teach these
intercultural savoirs and communicative competence in an integrated way.
The fact that intercultural development implies personality development of
course makes it difficult, if not impossible, to define levels of intercultural proficiency parallel to the six levels of communicative proficiency distinguished in
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. In the light of only incomplete research evidence regarding the way in which intercultural learning
processes evolve, developing detailed guidelines as a concrete basis for course
development is as yet not possible.
What is possible, however, is to put forward a series of more or less abstract
criteria which course planners can observe to select cultural contents and culture
learning tasks. The criteria reflect recent work in critical anthropology and
cultural studies, as well as current developments in educational theory. They try
to meet the limitations of current culture-and-language teaching approaches,
and square firmly with the pendulum swing away from teacher-centred
approaches and the passing on of knowledge towards approaches that consist in
creating opportunities for learners to learn how to autonomously acquire competencies and skills in addition to knowledge. The discussion of these criteria will
make it clear that, although this paper endorses the Council of Europes
approach to the teaching of communicative competence in a foreign language as
laid out in its 2001 framework document, it is critical of the way in which the
document deals with the development of intercultural competences in a foreign
language learning context.

Language Learning, Culture Learning and Learner Autonomy

Autonomous learning has become something of a buzzword of late in educational circles, much like constructivist learning, the information highway society, lifelong learning or the learning society.
The extent of this pre-eminence is reflected in curricular documents, in statements such as the following:
The school cannot itself impart all the knowledge pupils will need. () In
their studies they [pupils] shall acquire a foundation of life-long learning.
Changes in working-life, new technology, internationalisation and the
complexity of environmental issues impose new demands on peoples
knowledge and ways of working. Pupils shall develop their ability to take
initiatives and responsibility and to work and solve problems both independently and together with others. (Ministry for Education and Science in
Sweden and National Agency for Education, 1998: 67)
What is here proposed as a new onset for education is already practised by
many foreign-language teachers, who consciously or not occasionally include
problem-based or task-based learning approaches in their classroom teaching,
which leave more room for learner initiative.
The goal of task-based learning is not the predetermined teaching of a specific
grammatical structure or lexical item, but rather the satisfactory completion of a
meaningful communicative task (Allen, 2000). Examples of tasks include activi-

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ties, such as organising a rock festival and agreeing on a line-up of artists with a
certain audience in mind; or planning a municipal sports hall for the area. Problem-solving activities of this kind encourage critical thinking, collaborative
learning, self-initiated knowledge acquisition, cooperative evaluation of alternatives and collective decision making. Language elements and language production are anchored in real-world plausibility (Skehan, 1998). A problem-based
orientation combined with some focus on grammatical or lexical patterns can
greatly enhance learners fluency in the foreign language as well as improve their
(language) learning skills, social competence and world knowledge.
Problem-based approaches in foreign-language teaching certainly challenge
learners from a linguistic and a communicative point of view. Learners will want
to express themselves on various points and will need to use the appropriate
language to do so. However, from an intercultural competence point of view, the
learning potential of the problems that have commonly been selected tends to
have been low. The tasks, such as the ones mentioned above, do not necessarily
invite learners to reflect on how their own cultural identity, frame of reference,
norms, values, body language or behaviour differ from or are similar to those of
people originating from other cultural backgrounds. Learners are not usually
challenged to think about their perceptions of other cultures or to put themselves
in the shoes of someone living in the foreign culture. They are, equally, not
expected to take on an insider rather than an outsider view of another culture.
Tasks, such as agreeing on a surprise birthday party for an India-born friend
(whom to invite, what present to bring, what food to serve, what location, time
and music to choose, etc.); or agreeing on ways to promote contacts between
parents of ethnic-minority children and parents of non-ethnic-minority children,
tend not to have been included in foreign-language classrooms.
In spite of a slight swing towards autonomous learning in foreign-language
teaching, teaching tends to have remained confined to the largely
teacher-centred passing on of mostly linguistic and some cultural information,
and to creating opportunities for practising particular language skills and strategies. Consistent training of learner autonomy never really got off the ground.
Learner autonomy was associated with lack of direction, learner laziness, loss of
quality and omission of linguistic accuracy work, often wrongfully so.
Indeed, autonomous learning approaches do not involve less teacher direction or preparation, though on the face of it, it may look that way. Teacher guidance and intervention will, however, come at a later point in the learning process,
namely after learners have encountered a problem and require assistance, have
already produced text and require language help, have already come up with a
solution to a particular (intercultural) problem and require feedback. In contrast
to the PPP-sequence, i.e. the presentation-practice-production sequence advocated in many pre- and in-service teacher-training courses (e.g. Ur, 1996) where
the focus on the grammatical form occurs at the beginning of the learning
process, in a learner autonomy approach the selection of the pattern or structure
to be practised follows pupil production and is based on the areas for
intercultural and communicative improvement that have become obvious from
the teachers analysis of learners texts. During this follow-up phase, it is the
teacher who decides on the language to be offered, the activities to be carried out,

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the order in which these activities are to be completed, as well as the time needed
to do each activity, much like in traditional classrooms.

Selecting Cultural Content

In a learner autonomy approach, the selection of the culture topics to be
explored or the culture learning tasks to be completed remains the responsibility
of the teacher or course developer. We will now present a series of selection criteria which course developers can observe. These criteria are to be considered
tools, not dogmas. They can help course planners and teachers decide on the
contents and tasks they select for a particular group of learners. They can also
help educators account for the choices they make. In task-based course design
accountability is a key term. Educators have to be able to explain why particular
elements of knowledge are deemed valuable and others are not, or why particular tasks deserve learner investment of time and energy and others do not.
Relevance for learners
Teaching civilisation or Landeskunde has traditionally been about teaching the
truth about the foreign culture or cultures associated with particular foreign
languages. The traditional cultural curriculum covers a body of knowledge
addressing a large number of cultural domains. In an attempt to present learners
with a representative picture of a particular culture, these domains include:
geography, politics, the arts, tourist highlights, education, food and drink, transport, the media, etc. Information is given at the institutional level as well as at the
micro-level of daily life (Risager, 1991). Care is taken to present learners with an
up-to-date picture.
The point of reference has been the foreign culture, not the learner. However,
as Lyotard suggested already in 1984, the legitimisation of all knowledge
included in any curriculum is its performativity for the learner. Therefore, the
question one should ask is whether or not this body of knowledge is of any use or
interest to a particular learner group. In addition, one should consider whether
these learners can relate to and understand the information presented to them.
Presenting 13-year-olds, for example, with a survey of a countrys political
system may not make for much cultural learning since research has shown that
these learners are not yet ready for this topic and will surely not be able to
compare political systems in a nuanced way (Cain & Briane, 1994).
When selecting cultural contents one should also reflect upon whether these
contents will not confirm already existing stereotypes which learners may have.
This may be the case when presenting learners with an image of strange British
food, neo-nazi attacks on immigrant people in Germany or examples of chauvinistic attitudes of the French.
One may also ask whether knowing the names of the major rivers in a country
or the titles of the main literary masterpieces will help learners acquire the skills
and knowledge they need in intercultural contact situations. Cultural information that seems particularly relevant in this respect is what one should be aware
of when interacting with someone originating from the foreign culture, so as not
to cause feelings of irritation in ones interlocutor or be irritated by ones interlocutors behaviour. The cultural contents selected should have the potential of rais-

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ing the learners awareness of possible cultural differences and

misunderstandings, as well as of the feelings, opinions and attitudes these differences may bring about in people whose intercultural competence is not well
developed.
This kind of cultural information will typically be linked to differences in
interpersonal relationships, body language, visiting conventions, ritual behaviour, etc. These topics do not merely aim at making sure that learners do not make
cultural mistakes. The contents should also incite reflection in learners on their
own culture, and on what they consider normal from their own cultural point of
view. They will also help learners relate what they consider normal to what is
considered normal against the background of another cultural frame of reference. In addition, these topics make it clear to learners that culture matters in
language learning, and that using a foreign language always implies that one
enters a cultural world that may be different from ones own.
Representing cultures
The received common-sense view of culture typical of foreign-language
education to date includes the conviction that the truth regarding the essence of a
particular culture or people can be passed on. In foreign-language teaching,
cultural contents continue to be presented from a monoperspectival point of
view, and culture continues to be conceived as a static, monolithic, idealised,
undiversified object of study.
It is surprising that this notion of culture persists to date and has remained
largely unexamined in view of developments in critical anthropology, philosophy, literature or cultural studies, which have all criticised reductive, static,
monolithic and deterministic views of culture, and have come to use
postmodernist-influenced concepts of culture (Appadurai, 1996; Atkinson, 1999;
Clifford, 1992). These concepts lend expression to the character of current societies, which are non-deterministic, for ever changing and fluid. Todays societies
are composed of people who are members of many different groups and, therefore, carry many different identities. People do not envision themselves as
simply members of homogeneous, unified cultural groups, as simply the
embodiments of a particular cultures rules, conventions, behaviours, norms and
values. Yet and at the same time, they cannot deny that they are always members
of particular social or cultural groups, and as such receive guidance on how to
behave and what to believe (see e.g. Bourdieu et al., 1998; Giddens & Pierson,
1998). This membership, however, does not deprive them of the right to be different and depart from the norm, and in that way to a certain extent, to affect the
rules of the groups to which they feel they belong.
With a view to developing intercultural competence in learners it is essential
that foreign-language education uses a concept of culture that adequately
reflects the character of the world in which learners are living. Therefore, it is
imperative to make it clear to learners that other cultures, like their own, are
anything but homogeneous, all-encompassing entities. It is important to unveil
the fissures, inequalities, disagreements, cross-cutting influences, as well as the
agreements and elements of stability that exist in and around all cultures. The
acknowledgement and acceptance of multiple, complex cultural identities

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should be a first principle of ESL teaching and teacher preparation (Atkinson,

1999: 644).
One way to ensure that learners gain an adequate view of their own and of
other cultures is to complement the hitherto commonly chosen outsider
approach to the presentation of foreign cultures with an insider approach. An
insider approach goes beyond presenting one perspective on a particular aspect
of the foreign culture. It investigates the different understandings which
members of that culture may have of, for example, particular political or ethical
issues, or the different attitudes they may hold towards particular values, institutions, behaviours or symbols.
Presenting learners with multiple perspectives will promote a dynamic view
of cultures, and help learners understand that all cultures are continuously influenced by other cultures and cannot be considered in a territorialised way, as
being bound to a particular geographical part of the world or as locked within the
boundaries of a particular nation state.
Presenting cultures as unbounded and as related to other cultures may also
bring power relationships that exist within and between cultures more to the
forefront. Much academic effort has gone into establishing this interpenetration
and lack of strong boundaries between cultural groups in the past 15 years (e.g.
Appadurai, 1996; Clifford, 1992; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997). Pratt (1991), for example, coined the term contact zones to describe the social spaces where cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations
of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in
many parts of the world today (Pratt, 1991: 34). Culture teaching has until now
chosen not to touch upon existing power relationships. The responsibility of
foreign-language teachers to develop awareness in learners of the political implications of cultural relationships is a politically and ethically contested issue. An
adequate presentation of cultures cannot, however, pass over such historical and
present-day relationships.

Selecting Culture Learning Tasks (savoir-apprendre)

Just as the cultural content of foreign-language courses deserves more scrutiny than it has received till now, the culture learning tasks and practice activities,
which are at the heart of any learning process, also deserve closer examination if
we want to enhance the potential of language courses for promoting the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence.
Scaffolding learning
Throughout the history of foreign-language teaching, authors have tried to
design exercise typologies that could meaningfully integrate a variety of exercise
types and adequately scaffold the learning process. Taking into account insights
from educational psychology, developmental psychology and, in the case of
foreign-language learning, linguistics, exercise typologies attempt to grade
language learning. They organise different exercise types into a systematic
whole that holds the promise of grading the learning process in such a way that
steady progress will be made, which will eventually lead to autonomous learn-

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ing and the acquisition of a high level of knowledge, skill and competence (Sercu,
2000c).
The educational concepts that have been particularly important in this respect
are those of meaningful learning (Ausubel et al., 1978) and levels of processing
(Craik & Lockhart, 1972), as well as taxonomies of cognitive objectives (De Corte
et al., 1981). According to Ausubel et al., materials can only promote learning
when they are meaningfully related to what students already know, and when
they contain cues and exercise types that help students process the new contents
and relate them to the contents of their existing schemata. It follows that exercise
types which are too far above or too far below the learners level of competence
may be detrimental to the learning process, because they either do not challenge,
or else, overcharge them. Craik and Lockhart (1972), who developed the notion
of levels of processing, have shown that learners remember particular items of
information better when they process them at deep, not shallow levels. De Corte
et al. distinguishes seven kinds of cognitive objectives and orders them according
to the underlying principles of increase in the complexity of cognitive operations and the degree of independence in information processing envisaged (De
Corte et al., 1981). According to these principles, learning tasks can be identified
as apperception tasks, recognition tasks or reproduction tasks, which all
require receptive-reproductive cognitive operations. They can also be identified
as interpretative production of information tasks, convergent production of
information tasks, evaluative production of information tasks or divergent
production of information tasks, which all require productive cognitive
operations.
Respecting the characteristics of developmental processes in intercultural
course design requires that all culture practice activities are chosen in such a way
that they are meaningfully related to learners knowledge about the particular
culture in focus and their general understanding of cultures, as well as to their
autonomous culture-learning skills and their overall level of intercultural
communicative competence. Observing the hierarchical principles underlying
De Cortes taxonomy of cognitive objectives demands that course developers try
to incite deep levels of involvement with the cultural savoirs offered, and strive
for an increase in the complexity of cognitive operations and in the degree of
independence in information processing envisaged.
Despite the fact that a number of exercise typologies observing the
above-mentioned principles have been developed in a foreign-language teaching context (e.g. Neuner et al., 1985), foreign-language textbooks to date seem to
include mostly culture-learning tasks that can be classified as apperception and
reproduction tasks, requiring only low levels of involvement with the cultural
contents offered (Sercu, 2000b, c). It seems that what textbooks have been doing is
to throw chunks of culture at learners, have them read some texts that deal with
cultural topics, and hope that this cultural foot bath will eventually have a positive effect on pupils mind-sets, and turn them into open-minded and tolerant
citizens (Sercu, 2000a). The learning tasks in textbooks tend not to invite pupils to
process, apply or reflect on any previously acquired information regarding the
target culture and people. Pupils are not normally expected to compare
cultures, empathise with the points of views of other people, or practise critical
culture-learning skills. Most tasks are individual learning tasks: learners

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acquire information alone. They do not work together to construct additional

knowledge. Constructivist tasks in which learners construct knowledge themselves, explore cultures, take multiple perspectives on a cultural issue, are rare.
The approach to culture teaching is non-recursive. Cultural contents are offered
on one occasion only. The learner is not invited to reorganise or reconsider prior
knowledge in the light of new information, nor to identify traces of prior texts
and events as they appear in new contexts.
Learner autonomy
As becomes clear from the above enumeration of tasks, other criteria than the
ones put forward in earlier exercise typologies, namely deep levels of processing,
meaningful learning and grading of cognitive objectives, need to be observed if
one wants to enhance learner autonomy. When knowledge was regarded as
something true, as something that had been verified by the force of rational logic
or by scientific research, and therefore deserved to be passed on to the next generation, the principles described above were adequate and served learners well. In
todays teaching, the emphasis can no longer only be on leading learners towards
the one answer to a question or the one solution to a problem in a structured and
teacher-directed way (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). As noted by Holec and
Huttunen (1997), who provide an overview of the work done by the Council of
Europes Modern Languages Project in the area of learning to learn, students
should be given repeated opportunities to develop specific strategy areas, such
as reflection skills, self and peer evaluation, cooperation skills, negotiation skills
and study skills. In view of the fact that it has become less clear than ever before
which knowledge is legitimate and which is not, learners have to be presented
with learning tasks that teach them how to consider, criticise and reflect upon the
information they use in order to ascertain the extent to which it contains any truth
(Jarvis, 2001). Learners also need to gain experience with alternative ways to
arrive at a solution, and to develop the skill to reflect on which way of proceeding
works best for them and for a particular problem under particular circumstances.
Language-and-culture courses should also include tasks that promote the development of the skill of meta-reflection on the learning process, as well as self-regulated learning strategies. Tasks should take care to enhance learners self-esteem,
self-awareness and self-confidence in setting out their own learning path and
assessing their own achievements in a realistic way.
To help students learn and develop independent self-regulated strategies, the
teacher can choose from a range of scaffolding approaches. These may take the
form of modelling and explaining approaches to solving intercultural problems
or working through intercultural questions with the student. This may be challenging for teachers, but it is certainly important for students to acquire problem-solving strategies and to learn to articulate their understanding of a
particular problem as well as the steps they plan to undertake to solve it. Learners
may also be presented with computer-based scaffolding programs, which lead
them through a problem-solving process by presenting questions, contrasting
scenarios, cases or examples for analysis or procedural guidance in how to
complete a task. Teachers may coach students in problem-solving approaches or
task analysis. They may discuss with students which sources they will need to
arrive at a balanced and multiperspectival picture of a particular cultural

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phenomenon. They may prompt students to evaluate different culture-learning

strategies or to brainstorm different solutions to cultural problems. They may ask
students to write a reflective diary in which students enter comments regarding
the cultural information they encountered, their interpretation of that information, the strategies they used to acquire additional information regarding a
particular aspect of a foreign culture, etc.

Conclusion
The intercultural dimension of foreign-language education is about more than
teaching communicative competence and, in addition, passing on an extensive
body of information about the foreign culture(s) which tend(s) to be associated
with the foreign language one is teaching. The acquisition of intercultural
communicative competence, of course, requires that one increases ones familiarity with foreign cultures, with ones own culture and with the relationships
between cultures. In addition, it implies that one acquires the competence to
learn cultures autonomously.
We hope to have made it clear why current societal developments compel us
to move away from a teacher-led language-and-culture pedagogy to a
student-centred autonomous learning approach. We also hope to have demonstrated what criteria can be observed when revising curricula and developing
language-and-culture courses aimed at the development of intercultural
communicative competence and learner autonomy, and why both the cultural
contents and the culture-learning tasks of traditional language-and-culture
courses deserve serious scrutiny.
It is our conviction that in the multicultural international world in which we
live foreign-language competence will gain in importance. Therefore, the teaching of communicative competence must be continued at the same high level as at
present. It is, however, high time that language educators also realise that speaking a foreign language always means entering a cultural world that may to a
lesser or a larger extent be different from ones own. Therefore, all language
education should always also be intercultural education.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Lies Sercu, KULeuven, Faculteit
Letteren, Blijde-Inkomststraat21,3000Leuven, Belgium (lies.sercu@arts.kuleuven.ac.be).
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