I wonder how I can do something like this with my students: Teachers’ perceptions on the intercultural turn in English language teaching

Abstract

Intercultural perspectives have become fundamental to revitalise language teaching and learning in educational contexts. Contemporary English language teaching (ELT) should provide learners with the analytical tools to promote Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and cope with diverse sources of intercultural encounters universally. This leads to the necessity of ELT advance towards the intercultural turn and go under a systematic analysis of updated teaching roles, profiles and pedagogies to address the new complexities and implications of teaching a language in the 21^st century for more diverse groups of people. This study aims at presenting critical reflections and insights on this topic from a Colombian perspective. Twenty-five English language teachers, guided by a qualitative interpretive approach, discussed their perceptions about culture and intercultural English language teaching (IELT). The findings indicate language teachers’ incipient interest, a positive attitude towards IELT, and budding ICC pedagogical praxis despite frequent limited understanding, lack of guidance and resources to move forward intercultural approaches. This study makes a contribution to the field by prompting a discussion about English language teachers’ perceptions about culture teaching and current or prospect IELT in their teaching praxis. In addition, an empirically-based Statement of philosophy to set IELT guidelines is proposed as per to promote concrete goals to foster IELT.