FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING EDUCATION AND INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE. THE CASE OF A PUBLIC MEXICAN UNIVERSITY

Language teacher education is a multifaceted activity that should take into account linguistic, pedagogical and cultural issues. The way people interact nowadays in different communicative and cultural contexts demands of language teachers and teacher educators to bring cultural issues into their training.  As Sercua (2006, p.1) puts it “the main objective of foreign language education is no longer defined strictly in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence.”

This concept of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has long been studied as part of the theories of international communication and its crossovers with issues of culture and identities (Gudykunst & Mody, 2002) and has been the subject of multiple debates in terms of power and culture. In the area of foreign teacher education, the works of Byram (1997) on the teaching and assessment of this competence and his intercultural studies on the foreign educator’s cultural competence are seminal. Kramsch’s (1993) contribution also underlines the importance of including this type of competence in the syllabus of a communicative language class since language and culture are inseparable items of effective communication. An interesting contribution by Dema &  Moeller (2012) takes the reader through a historical perspective on the teaching of culture in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) showing how culture has come to be a singled-out part of the curriculum to being the centre of it as more expertise in intercultural communication is needed in interactions of all kinds: travel, business, medical tourism, migrations, among others.

It has now become evident  that:
a) the teaching of language as culture is an approach needed in order to develop more the students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC);
b) language teachers and their education need to put intercultural teacher training as a main part of their curricula;
c) it is important to examine how this is being achieved in culturally diverse contexts of FLT education to learn from that experience; and
d) this research could inform the development of curricular design and in-service professional development options for language teachers and their educators.

The purpose of this work is to present a research project in its initial stage that aims to find and identify the cultural competency profiles of foreign language educators in a Mexican setting.