Intercultural Competence & Foreign Language Learning in Higher Education: Present and Future Directions

The Department of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter is hosting an online one-day conference to bring together researchers, professionals and practitioners with expertise in integrating Intercultural Competence in the teaching and learning foreign languages in Higher Education on 2 July 2021.

Intercultural competence is essential to operate in our multicultural world and language learners are in an ideal position to engage actively with cultural diversity. During their academic training, they experience and reflect on how communities of people engage through other languages in different social practices grounded in their own values and beliefs, and make sense of the world they live in. 

Although the centrality of the development of intercultural competence in language learning makes Modern Language and Foreign Language programmes ideal sites of intercultural expertise there is a need to articulate more clearly and explicitly its richness and value as well as its contribution to the Internationalization and Global Citizenship Educational HE agenda and its future directions.

Plenary Speakers:

• Prof Prue Holmes (Prof. in International and Intercultural Education in the Department of Education and MA Programme Director) Durham University.
• Prof Amy Rossomondo (Director of Spanish – Accesso digital learning environment) The University of Kansas.

For further information, please contact Prof Sonia Cunico (S.Cunico@exeter.ac.uk). The conference is organised by the University of Exeter with the support of AULC (Association of University Language Communities in the UK and Ireland) and a grant from Language Act and World Making.