Forum - Adriana Diaz - Aug 10 2011

The Sspeaker for Augist 10 2011 is Dr Adriana Diaz a lecturer in Spanish from the School of Languages and Linguistics at Griffith University.

Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning: Is it possible to bridge the gap between Policy and Practice?

In recent years, Australian language-in-education policies have explicitly endorsed an intercultural approach to language teaching and its avowed purpose of developing learners’ intercultural competence (MCEETYA, 2005). The most ambitious initiative put forth to achieve this goal in practice has been the Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning Practice (ILTLP) project: (http://www.iltlp.unisa.edu.au/ ).
This project, commissioned by DEST and carried out at national level between 2006 and 2008, set out to provide languages teachers with the tools to develop an “intercultural stance” to their teaching and curriculum development practices. As part of this project, many useful resources, research projects and reports have been produced. Yet, there still is uncertainty about ILTL’s actual realisation in everyday practice (Kohler, 2010: 190). In this presentation I would like to explore a number of obstacles standing in the way between policy and practice and open the floor to a dialogue about the core issues underlying the development of an “intercultural stance” in languages education.