Becoming Equipped to Communicate (BEC)

Becoming Equipped to Communicate (BEC) is a language and culture learning curriculum. The BEC progressively leads learners into broader and deeper local relationships as the learners advance through the learning levels with the associated community-based activities. Even as learners grow in local relationships, BEC helps them move through key areas of culture toward a thematic worldview understanding of the local culture and language community. This approach provides learners with a robust foundation for effective communication and language development work.

By the end of the BEC curriculum, learners who have followed the program will have cultivated many significant relationships in their new community as a part of identifying key themes of life in the worldview around them. In this sense, BEC acts as much more than a language learning program. Through this resource, cross-cultural workers grow to become a normal part of the life of the culture and language community: learning to understand, speak, read, write, and naturally interact in order to take an active and relevant role in people's lives for focused relationship-building and language development purposes.

The BEC curriculum:

-Explains the necessary foundations for deep communication

-Provides a comprehensive scope, sequence, and time schedule for the entire trajectory of culture and language learning

-Leads cross-cultural workers through successive levels of community-based activities that help them build deep relationships with others

-Includes detailed, step-by-step learning plans for each level

-Gives practical advice so that learners at any level can use the curriculum to continue to progress

-Includes self-evaluation checklists for each level in order to monitor learner progress

-Guides the learning process such that workers reach worldview-level communicative ability by the end of the curriculum