Nineteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Interculturality entails a number of underlying cognitive, effective, and behavioral competences. These include knowledge, attitudes, skills of interpreting and relating skills of discovery, and critical cultural awareness. Various methods and techniques that language teachers can use to support learning processes have, for centuries, been a central topic of discussion. With the advent of communicative language teaching in the 1970s, the focus of methodologists was strongly directed towards classroom methods and procedures which would most effectively support the acquisition of language skills. With advances in technology, there has been an increasing emphasis on how ICT tools can enhance classroom methods. In recent years, however, there has been a growing trend in teacher education to see the teaching process not only in terms of a set of methods and techniques, but from the perspective of the teachers who employ these methods and thus to explore in wider terms the competences that teachers need to develop in order to support language learning. These competences may relate to a variety of professional areas: knowledge, skills, values, etc. They are in essence of a didactic nature, but also include intercultural, social, and language competences. The action-oriented, competence-based view of teaching, considered in this research, strongly reflects the view of language and language learning, which underlies both the Common European Framework of Reference and the European Language Portfolio. The central questions of a competence orientation are: what do language users, learners, teachers need to be able to do in order to optimize language use, learning, teaching?