Reading Texts and Tasks for Intercultural Competence Development: A Foreign Language Coursebook
Exploratory Practice Study

Abstract

Research suggests that foreign language (FL) reading contributes to intercultural competence development. While previous studies mainly involved FL literature or texts from the media and activities designed to prompt learning processes or outcomes connected to intercultural competence, this study investigates an EFL coursebook and the potential contribution of its reading texts and tasks to language learners’ intercultural competence. The Model of the Intercultural Reader (Hoff, 2016) conceptualizes the reader-text communication forms that interculturally competent readers engage in, and the Intercultural Communicative Competence Model (Byram, 1997; 2021) suggests five sets of pedagogical objectives (i.e. ‘savoirs’) that can be used to teach and assess intercultural competence. The study draws on these models to explore how students worked on their intercultural competence when reading the coursebook’s texts and when completing its reading tasks.

The coursebook’s readings were analysed to reveal their cultural content, and they were identified to illustrate culture at micro, macro and intercultural levels. During three lessons, students worked with three readings, each including mainly one of these three types of cultural content. Students were asked to read the text, write down and then share with peers the thoughts and feelings they experienced, and to complete the coursebook’s reading tasks and answer questions about this experience.

The students examined the content of the coursebook’s texts from multiple perspectives, examination conceptualized in this study as ‘intercultural reading’. This entailed interpretation, reflection on one’s own and others’ perspectives, collaborative meaning construction, and identifying intertextual connections and the impact of language and text structure on readers. While some of these aspects were enhanced when completing the coursebook’s reading tasks, others did not emerge at all and could be observed only when students read the texts or only when they shared with peers the thoughts and feelings they experienced while reading. Additionally, students drew on attitudes and displayed skills suggested in the ‘savoirs’ pedagogical objectives. This happened mainly as part of intercultural reading.

The study suggests that FL coursebook reading texts can be used to foster intercultural competence regardless the type of cultural content entailed. While the coursebook’s reading tasks may limit their potential, ‘intercultural reading’ provides a framework for modelling students’ engagement with these texts so that forms of reader-text communication associated with successful intercultural communication emerge. FL reading activities that entail engagement with peers and multiple (reading) texts appear to enhance opportunities to acquire cultural knowledge and practice intercultural competence related skills.