To develop the students’ cultural competence is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching. While Byram’s intercultural communicative competence has been a guiding concept in this area for years, newer concepts, such as transcultural competence, discourse competence and symbolic competence, have been introduced in recent years in order to make up for notions of cultural learning Byram’s competence seems to neglect.
An issue with cultural competences in school seems to be that it is hard to train and evaluate them with specific tasks. Mediation as a rather new competence could solve this problem! It is a competence in foreign language learning that enables communication between two people that would not understand each other otherwise because of different linguistic and/or cultural backgrounds. English as the lingua franca of globalization is often used for mediation, so teachers-to-be will have to train their future students to mediate into and from English. Instead of translating word by word, they have to learn to adapt the message to the communicative situation and the addressee, including the cultural backgrounds of the people – or texts – involved.
In the course, you will get to know different approaches to teaching culture, on the one hand, and aspects of the complex process of cultural mediation, on the other hand. You will try out methods of training cultural competences through mediation. Throughout the first half of the term, we will put together a guideline on how to enhance cultural learning by creating good cultural mediation tasks, which will then be applied and reflected on in your own teaching units on cultural mediation.
