Language awareness and (critical) cultural awareness – relationships, comparisons and contrasts

By M. Byram. 2012

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The vexed question of the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘culture’ will be the starting point. I do not propose to ‘resolve’ the question but to consider some ways in which relationships between cultural awareness and language awareness might be conceptualised and then have some impact on language education. By ‘language education’ I refer to the teaching and learning of all languages in a curriculum, whether this be the synchronic experienced curriculum of a learner at a given point in time or the diachronic curriculum of their lifelong learning. I will draw on the Council of Europe's concept and platform for ‘Languages in Education, Languages of Education’ and plurilingual and intercultural education to provide an overview of the issues involved. Finally, I will consider the impact on teaching and learning in practice by suggesting that, in the best cases, language and culture teaching produces, through the development of linguistic and intercultural competence, alternative conceptualisations of the world and contributes to the education/Bildung of the individual in society.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00d4d13541dc8bd6397c95f1e0c3ac006a71464b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Language and Linguistics

1. Jennfier Jun-Li Chen
2. Robert Godwin-Jones
3. Shu Ching Yang
4. Emrah Özdemir

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Jennfier Jun-Li Chen
2. Robert Godwin-Jones
3. Shu Ching Yang

Citations in the corpus

• Promoting cross-cultural understanding and language use in research-oriented Internet-mediated intercultural exchange (2016, background): “Byram further insists upon the significance of critical cultural awareness, which “includes a critique of our own communities and societies as well as that of other countries” (Byram, 2012, p. 10) .”
• Telecollaboration as an approach to developing intercultural communication competence (2019, background): “It joins recent calls in studies on intercultural communication to move beyond the traditional categories of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Byram, 1997; Rhodes, 2010) to a more personal engagement with global issues, reflecting Byram’s addition of critical cultural awareness to his framework (Byr”