Description
The question that I will be addressing within the context of foreign or second language education (FL/L2), considers the needs of students who live in the 21st century. According to the CEFR/CV (CoE 2018) we should prepare students, as ‘citizens’, i.e. as ‘social agents’ (CoE 2018, p. 23) to interact successfully in a FL/L2. This demanding goal involves a set of skills, competences, and knowledge that refer to a multifaceted notion of language, embedded in the equally complex and liquid nature of culture and cultural identities. Keeping up with current times, when personal and social relations cross over several types of borders, communication must be considered within its contextual complexity, beyond the functional uses of language, no longer understood as a stable, predictable noun. Preparing learners to manage the frictions and gaps generated by the interaction between cultures and to identify the tensions and misunderstandings that a small world made global tends to intensify, requires a critical stance, interpretive and reflective tools and practice.Our super-complex, polarised world of fake news, alternative realities, growing populisms, and science denial conspiracy theories, requires the promotion of active and meaningful citizenship education. Language classes that aim to prepare students to interact successfully with alterity and to critically mediate uncertainty and complexity should consider intercultural citizenship education as a priority.
| Period | 26 Sept 2020 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Fostering Multilingual EFL Classrooms through an ELF Approach |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lisbon, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Intercultural citizenship education
- multilingualism
- ELT