At this year’s PanSIG 2021 conference, the TD SIG facilitated a forum with the Intercultural Communication in Language Education (ICLE) SIG. The session was titled Developing an Intercultural Understanding as Teachers, with the forum opening the conference on Friday, May 14.

The event featured presentations by invited speakers Yoko Munezane from Rikkyo University, Stephen Ryan from Sanyo Gakuen University, and Helen Spencer-Oatey from the University of Warwick and GlobalPeople Consulting Ltd. Each presentation explored different elements of what developing intercultural practice, understanding, and principles in foreign language education entails.

Yoko Munezane introduced a new empirical model of intercultural communicative competence, exploring the structural relationships among eight individual differences factors, and how this model could be applied to the language classroom to promote intercultural friendship.

Following this, Stephen Ryan provided lessons learnt through an autobiographical presentation outlining the evolution of his understanding and approaches to the position of culture in his teaching.

Finally, Helen Spencer-Oatey demonstrated ways we can learn to notice how socialisation-based multiple identities affect behaviour, through reflecting on their potential significance and seeing what impacts they have on our (mis)evaluations of others. 

Following the series of presentations, an engaging discussion took place in which the speakers reflected on each other’s talks, established points of resonance, and developed some new ideas together. The TD SIG would like to thank you if you attended this forum.