Garrett-Rucks, P. (2016). Intercultural Competence in Instructed Language Learning: Bridging Theory and Practice. Information Age.
It’s a tough time for language educators. Although the ability to communicate across cultures has become more important in recent years due to globalization and internationalization, foreign language acquisition is often left out of the conversation about how to foster intercultural communication in the United States. Meanwhile, according to the MLA Survey of Enrollments in Languages other than English, overall Foreign Language enrollment has “decreased by 6.7% between 2009 and 2013” (MLA, 2013) at the University level. Paula Garrett-Rucks takes on both of these challenges in her new book, “Intercultural Competence in Instructed Language Learning: Bridging Theory and Practice.” The book outlines how teachers can bring intercultural competence into language classes and argues that language is essential to authentic and appropriate intercultural communication. By providing a theoretical and practical basis for how foreign language acquisition and intercultural competence reinforce each other, Garrett-Rucks’s book gives Foreign Language teachers the ability to advocate for their professions’ importance in their home institutions and in broader international, intercultural contexts.
Garrett-Rucks acknowledges that while we often pay lip-service to the idea that language and culture are bound up with each other, Foreign Language teaching and Intercultural Studies often fail to take this into account both theoretically and practically. Studies of pre-service foreign language teachers’ lesson plans suggest that cultural perspectives are often minimized or neglected (Garrett-Rucks, 133), and Garrett-Rucks notes that many “well-established models and theories describing the assessment and development of intercultural competence… mistakenly omit a category of second language development” (Garrett-Rucks, 3) as an integral part of intercultural competence. Her book attempts to bridge this gap by first theoretically connecting foreign language learning and intercultural competence, then presenting empirical evidence of how intercultural competence can be developed in the language classroom, and finally recommending how to train foreign language educators to include intercultural competence into their classes in a way that is commensurate with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language’s (ACTFL) World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (Standards.)
The book’s argument begins by developing an idea of culture through the lens of social and cultural anthropology in the second chapter. The book begins with an expansive definition of culture which includes “patterns of thinking, feeling, acting,” and other daily, mundane activities (Garrett-Rucks, 19). Garrett-Rucks reviews a variety of systematic models for describing and comparing various cultures including those of Kluckhohn and Hofstede, as well as the “Onion model,” which suggests there is greater variation from a cultural norm the further one moves away from a culture’s central values (Garrett-Rucks, 27), and the “Iceberg model” of culture, which suggests that observable behaviors and customs are just the surface of the cultural iceberg, while its defining features, its attitudes, beliefs, and core values, remain “underwater” (Garrett-Rucks, 28). Ultimately, Garrett-Rucks emphasizes the need to deconstruct the “monolithic” view of culture which leads to stereotypes and “us vs. them” ways of thinking, and prevents intercultural communication.
In the third chapter, Garrett-Rucks gives a more substantial definition of intercultural competence by reviewing the literature in the field of intercultural studies, drawing heavily on the models of Bennett, Byram, and the American Council on Education, and finally offering a rigorous comparison of Byram and Bennett’s models to draw out some the tensions between their approaches. She presents Bennett’s “Developmental Model” of Intercultural Sensitivity which describes a movement from Ethnocentric to Ethnorelative thinking, as well as Byram’s Intercultural Communicative Competence Model, which is a five-factor model used for describing intercultural competence that focuses on a learner’s attitude, knowledge, skills of interpretation and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness. Garrett-Rucks ultimately concludes, after a rigorous comparative analysis of the two models, that “the conceptual and theoretical limits of both models… did not emphasize communication sufficiently enough as an agent for self-change” (Garrett-Rucks, 58.)
The book continues in the fourth chapter to explore how it might be possible to bring intercultural competence into alignment with a Standards-based approach to foreign language teaching, but also continues to develop the theoretical position of the book regarding the meaning of culture by exploring the link between language, thought, and culture. Garrett-Rucks ultimately takes the position that ACTFL’s World Readiness Standards are compatible with certain approaches to intercultural competence, but that the “Culture” and “Comparisons” sections of the Standards need both a sequence of study and their own forms of assessment (Garrett-Rucks, 65). In the middle section of the book, Garrett-Rucks revisits the question of culture in a new constellation of how language, thought and culture relate to one another. Drawing on the theories of Vygotsky, Agar, Fantini, and Kramsch, the book adopts the term “languaculture” (LC) to indicate how language and culture are intertwined (Garrett-Rucks, 68.) The book relies on Geertz’s definition of culture, in that “language and other semiotic systems are not only carriers of culture; they are culture” (Garrett-Rucks, 69.) This definition of culture forms the basis for the model of how learners compare and contrast their LC1 with an LC2 by distancing themselves from both and viewing them through a “3rd lens” (Garrett-Rucks, 74) or from a “3rd place (Garrett-Rucks, 126.)
Chapters five and six provide the practical bridge from theory to practice as promised in the book’s title. Chapter five gives an overview of intercultural competence projects, especially focusing on projects made possible by new media, while Chapter six presents empirical evidence of three case studies conducted in a language classroom where an intercultural component played an important role, and demonstrates in a very concrete way how learners in a foreign language classroom, with the help of online, outside-class materials, develop intercultural competence. The concluding chapter of the book serves as a guide for educators in the Foreign Languages as to how they might incorporate intercultural competence into their classes in a way that agrees with the Standards.
Garrett-Rucks’s book is strongest in its grounded practicality in the situation of Foreign Language teaching in the US in 2016, as well as in its ability to make intercultural studies, cultural and social anthropology, and foreign language teaching research accessible. It is also keenly aware of the need for educators in Foreign Languages to be able to advocate for their profession both at the theoretical and practical level, and provides both theoretical positions and practical advice about how to do that. However, the book does seem to take a very strongly structuralist position about culture which might exclude material life from the definition of culture. Because the book relies on the ability to step into a “neutral” 3rd place in order to distance oneself from one’s own culture and the new culture under consideration, it may overemphasize the linguistic nature of culture, since if culture was also material it would be much harder to “step outside” of one’s material surroundings. While this preference for culture as language does not get in the way of the book’s most important goals, a definition of culture that included material life would actually fit better with the book’s position about culture that “there is no impartial ground from which to reason or interpret reality,” and would acknowledge the important role that material life plays in shaping culture, and the role it might play in intercultural competence. Regardless, the book remains an excellent resource for those who want to know more about the theory and practice of intercultural competence and how it might work productively in the language classroom not only to stabilize the profession of language teaching, but also to promote authentic intercultural competence.