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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1401

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Negotiation of meaning in intercultural contexts: A new form of assessment

Authors: Timpe, Veronika (1); Janssen, Gerriet (2)
Submitted by: Timpe, Veronika (TU Dortmund, Germany)

Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) has become an important focus in foreign language education. In recent years, policy makers have included intercultural objectives in curricula, leaving teachers faced with the challenge of promoting and assessing the acquisition of ICC. This is true for teachers of a variety of subjects, but it is particularly true for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL). All English language educators in Germany – from primary to upper secondary level – are now expected to promote and assess the acquisition of ICC in their learners.

In her 2012 keynote speech at the International Conference on the Development of Intercultural Competence, Heidi Byrnes called for a theoretical grounding of intercultural communicative competence in language education by anchoring it in particular in language assessment. Gains, she argued, would be made particularly through the development of assessment practices. To date, little practical intercultural assessment development has been done. However, Timpe, as part of her Ph.D. research, has developed assessment tools operationalizing the three language competences that according to Byram (1997) are essential in intercultural encounters: linguistic, sociolinguistic, and discourse competence. The tasks focusing on the assessment of discourse competence as the “ability to use, discover and negotiate strategies for the production and interpretation of […] dialogue texts which follow the conventions of the culture of an interlocutor or are negotiated as intercultural texts for particular purposes” (Byram, 1997, p.48) were at the center of this project.

This current study uses the assessment tasks developed by Timpe in 2011 to investigate in more detail the “turn-taking mechanism, impromptu planning decisions contingent on interlocutor input, and hence negotiation of global and local goals, including negotiation of meaning” (Kasper & Dahl, 1991, p. 19). These assessment tasks consisted of dyadic audiotaped telephone conversation role plays between university-level German learners of English and an L1 U.S.-American English speakers.  The role plays were conducted via Skype.  Each test-taker had to engage in a meaning clarification exercise, with the end of establishing an understanding of an unknown cultural concept (e.g., “beer-pong” or “homecoming”).

Following Long and Norris (2000), in that “the construct of interest in task-based assessment is performance of the task itself,” we will provide case studies describing these “self-contained episodes” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 134) in terms of how the different test-takers approach the construction of meaning. Hence, this paper will not only introduce this new assessment tool as an operationalization of Byram’s notion of discourse competence; moreover, it will provide a description of the strategies applied by university-level German learners of English who were engaged as the informants in this study.