How to teach it? Proposal for a Methodological Model of Intercultural Competence

The problem of how to promote the development of intercultural competence (IC) in a foreign language classroom is one of the more delicate aspects of the research relative to Foreign Language Education or, as I prefer to call it, Intercultural Foreign Language Education (IFLE). Such a problem is to be attributed in large part to the fact that, in the field of IFLE, implementing methodological choices means sinking into a theoretical terrain that, despite having been extensively studied since the beginning of the 1990’s, must still clarify itself in unambiguous and largely accepted key principles. From the operative-didactic point of view – which I will adopt in this paper – the most urgent theoretical knot to untangle is the conceptualization of intercultural competence as a model, intending for model “a generative framework, i.e. a pattern or a structure which can include all possible occurrences, and is able to generate behavior” (Balboni, 2006: 6). In other words, a model that is both complete in identifying the components (and the relationship between the components) of IC and at the same time is easily translatable in didactic performance. This paper will illustrate a proposal of a methodological model for intercultural competence focusing on two of its characteristics: being a model “of development” that conceptualizes the competence in its process of acquisition and/or of didactic promotion, and defines a set of intermediate stages; and putting each of these stages in relation with the educational goals, the didactic objectives to be pursued, and the most appropriate methodological principles for doing it. I will briefly go over the research phases that contributed to the delineation of the model: an experimental didactic form conducted with students of Italian at the National University of Ireland, Galway; and the analysis of a number of models of “intercultural competence”.