Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence (Multilingual Matters)

Foreign and second language teaching should prepare learners to use a language with fluency and accuracy, and also to speak with people who have different cultural identities, social values and behaviours. This text aims to define precisely what competencies are required, how these can be included in teachers' objectives and methods, and how the ability to communicate across cultural differences can be assessed.

Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus at Durham University, England. Having studied languages at Cambridge University, he taught French and  German in school and adult education and then did teacher education at Durham. He was adviser to the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe and then on the expert group which produced the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. His research has included the education of minorities, foreign language teaching and intercultural competence, and more recently on how the PhD is experienced and assessed in a range of different countries.