Michael Byram’s Model of Intercultural Communicative Competence is an effective tool to use when teaching, especially with a multicultural classroom.
In my experience, I have always felt it is important to be a culturally responsive teacher. This is something that is encouraged through Byram’s ICC model. You as the teacher need to be aware of various cultural aspects in order to support students with understanding other cultures and scenarios. Byram’s model shows five different kinds of skills that should be incorporated into language learning; Knowledge, skills of discovery and interaction, skills of interpreting and relating, attitudes, and critical cultural awareness (Waliński, 2012). Waliński ensures that these elements all connect and build off each other (2012). Without one, you can lose the rest. I think this concept is extremely helpful to keep in mind while teaching, especially internationally. I would like to talk about each element and how I can relate to each part in regards to my teaching in this blog post.
KNOWLEDGE
What Byram means when using the word knowledge is the awareness of stereotypes, social groups, and how they function and interact together (1997). When teaching, this can be incorporated through authentic materials. This could include guest speakers, real materials in regards to readings and texts, movies, music, blogs, the internet, and much more. A unit I completed with my fifth graders several times was a pen pal letter writing unit. This allowed them to write letters to students their age in another country and learn more about their lives in those countries.
SKILLS OF DISCOVERY AND INTERACTION
Byram describes this section as the “ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture/cultural practices and to operate knowledge, attitudes, [and] skills in real-time communication and interaction” (1997). This can be completed in classes through a variety of tasks such as chats, emails, discussing understandings and miscommunications, and role plays. My unit with the pen pal writing also is a way I’ve incorporated this into my own classroom. One successful part of this project was for students to gain more knowledge about how schools function in other countries. They were able to ask questions regarding school lunches, school costs, classes, languages in school, and more to compare and contrast. I was working in a class with Swedish students who were writing to students in the United States. My students were shocked to learn that school lunches were not free and that they needed to pay for anything extra with school, as school lunches and school supplies for students are free. They were also thrilled to find out that they played the same video games and read the same books and watched the same movies as the students in the United States. I think this opened the minds of students in both countries as to how different yet how similar they are with kids halfway across the world.
SKILLS OF INTERPRETING AND RELATING
This section is reliant on mediation. “Taking information, summarising it, and passing it on” is the Cambridge definition of mediation (2023). This stage encourages tasks like viewing and interpreting cultural documents, then understanding and relating to the information gathered. The goal is to “achieve a change of perspective” (Byram, 1997). This can be done with literary texts. When I taught third grade during my undergraduate program, I completed a unit that focused on a lot of this (and potentially with the “knowledge” section as well). We would read about different cultures and their celebrations in the month of December (we also completed the unit in December). Each student had a passport and we would “travel” to a different country, get their passports stamped, read about their cultural holidays, watched videos, and then compared it to their own experiences. This was done with a group of 18 students in a very small town in the middle of Pennsylvania in the United States. Most of the students hadn’t ever heard of the places in which we “travelled.” I think this definitely helped them learn a new perspective about the world and what other cultures celebrate. Though it wasn’t necessarily directly linked to mediation, it could have easily been adapted to do so through the communicative task of expert groups. Students could become experts with a certain cultural celebration to then relay the information to the whole class. I have also used this aspect in fifth grade where we read a book titled Boy Overboard. It told the story of two children who had to make a journey from Afghanistan to Australia without their parents in order to survive and reach a safe place to live. A student told me that his father went through something similar, but coming to Sweden instead of Australia, and it gave him a perspective of what his dad went through. He said it made him closer to his dad to understand the hardship he went through. Though incorporating tough stories such as Boy Overboard, if you include the right cultural approach it can be really beneficial for students.
ATTITUDE
Byram describes attitude as the “foundation of ICC” (1997). It is what holds all of our values, opinions, and willingness to accept, understand, and realise not only our own cultural views and experiences but others as well. This can vary in a lot of ways. It could look like a discussion about culture, presentations about cultural elements, or other aspects that are important to them. I have used this in my own classes as a discussion about things that are similar to them in Stockholm specifically (where all the students lived) and somewhere else they have been (even another part of Sweden). Most students were immigrants or refugees from other countries or they’re first generation Swedes. This gave them a lot to work with and a lot to accept with others in their class who are from different areas, even areas of the world that their home country/culture didn’t get along with. It was a nice exercise because we spoke about Stockholm as an experience we all could relate to, including me. I am an immigrant to Sweden and there are a lot of cultural differences between the United States and Sweden.
CRITICAL CULTURAL AWARENESS
I think this one is a very important one. The year I taught fifth grade English this hit me very hard and made me realise that I need to be more aware of things happening in the world. Even if they don’t affect me, they definitely affect my students and their families.
Boy Overboard could be another example of how I have used this in my own teaching. The characters needed to go to Australia, somewhere safe and that had immigration policies that allowed them. This brought up discussions about how different countries treat and support those who are fleeing as refugees or who want to enter as immigrants. Because this was a fifth grade class, we didn’t get too in depth with that discussion, but I didn’t even think I would even be able to facilitate conversations such as those without getting too anxious to say the “wrong” thing or if the students began to argue. In the same fifth grade class, we would sometimes do circle talks. Everyone sat in a circle, we spun a digital wheel with everyone’s names and whoever was chosen got to come up and pick a piece of paper. Each paper had a question or statement on it. Everyone in the circle had to comment about it (students were allowed to say “I don’t know” or “pass” if they didn’t want to speak or give an opinion). One of the papers said “What would you want to change about the world?” My student said, “I wish the Chinese would stop hurting the Urghur Muslims.” Several seconds of silence passed where everyone absorbed this information. The student sitting beside me, who was from China, began to silently cry. She explained that she wants the same and that she hopes people don’t think she supports that just because she is Chinese. We had a very rich discussion about how there are things you can be proud of from your culture, but that you don’t have to agree with everything your country does or thinks. The healthy conversation reassured my Chinese-Swedish student and all the students understood the point of that topic- we can love our country and not like everything it does (me giving my political opinions about the 2020 election as another example).
This model is something I have really been interested in since we discussed it in class. I hope to continue using this model more intentionally in my lessons and find ways to celebrate, learn about, and show off all cultures in my classroom.
References:
Byram, M. (1997). Model of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Müller- Hartmann,
Andreas / Schocker-von Ditfurth; Marita (2007). Introduction to English Language Teaching. Stuttgart: Klett. https://e-uic.uic.es/pluginfile.php/1084399/mod_resource/content/1/byram_icc_model.pdf
Cambridge English. (2023). Mediation Skills in the English Language Classroom. Cambridge
University Press and Assessment. https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/blog/mediation-in-the-english-classroom/#:~:text=Taking%20information%2C%20summarising%20it%2C%20and,language%20learners%20at%20all%20levels.
Knight, J. (2020). Planning a Communicative Lesson with a Task-Based Approach. [Slides].
Language Acquisition and Teaching EFL, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya.
Waliński, J. (2012, January). Enhancing intercultural communicative competence in an online
collaborative assessment environment: CEFult project. University of Lodz.
file:///C:/Users/Jaimerbug/Downloads/Walinski2012Enhancinginterculturalcommunicativecompetence.pdf