Developing intercultural intelligence competence in the foreign language classroom in Higher Education

Abstract

Focusing language teaching and learning on mediation with a view to raise intercultural awareness and to acquire intercultural competence means concentrating on the participants‘ points of view and experiences in order to integrate the intercultural aspect into their communicative practices. Understanding the importance of mediation and negotiation of meaning in the foreign language classroom, methodologies have been brought forward to try and help students in higher education to acquire linguistic as well as sociolinguistic skills, and as a natural outcome of internationalization efforts. Indeed, the growing internationalization of European Higher Education Institutions has aimed at developing foreign language and intercultural and international competences (ICC), with the aim of providing learners with the appropriate tools to make sense of the information brought about in the foreign language classroom tasks to be better prepared for the skills required in their future jobs or careers. These obviously include the skills related to intercultural communication and critical thinking. Following Moore-Jones‘s recent research (2018) about the three stages in the acquisition of the intercultural competence, the present work focuses on the last step, namely the acquisition of the so-called intercultural intelligence described by Peterson as ―the ability to engage in a set of cultural behaviors that uses skills and qualities that are tuned appropriately to the culture-based values and attitudes of the people with whom one interacts‖ (Peterson, 2004: 87), supposedly in the students‘ future work environment which higher education institutions prepare them for. This final stage is the creation of a meeting space between one's own culture and the target culture where the obstacles caused by exoticism, categorisation, stereotypes and prejudices will have been overcome, and in which the teacher's role as a mediator during the emergence of the intercultural awareness process is of key importance when it comes to choosing and organizing the appropriate tasks to accompany higher education learners in the building and strengthening of their intercultural competence in order to gradually become interculturally intelligent