Fostering students’ intercultural competence: An investigation of students’ perceptions of Americans and the US election in a school project

Abstract

This thesis investigates the extent to which students demonstrate intercultural competences (IC), and reports on a school project carried out in English teaching in lower secondary school. Fostering IC is becoming increasingly important, as our encounters with people with different beliefs and values occurs almost daily through social media, traveling and living in a multicultural society. As the new English curriculum in Norway has a greater focus on the development of IC, I believe that teaching IC in English as a foreign language (EFL) needs to be further researched. The objective for this thesis is to investigate students’ perceptions before and after a school project about American culture and the US election. The school project took place in two eighth-grade classes in Norway and was developed and carried out by the teachers. Consequently, I conducted qualitative research, where six students participated in focus group interviews and pre- and post-surveys. This thesis found that the students share different descriptions of how they perceive Americans, where some are superficial and without depth (stereotypes), others are connected to cultural topics such as the American dream, work ethic, and economical issues. Five key challenges to IC were identified: an “us vs them mentality”, a new knowledge – same attitudes tendency, stereotyping, the struggle of ambivalence, and paths to students’ intercultural learning process. EFL teachers must be aware that some of the competence aims may cause an “us vs them mentality” due to their emphasis on describing other cultures’ lifestyles and mindsets, rather than focusing on students’ own attitudes and skills when encountering other cultures. Furthermore, we must be aware of students’ stereotypes and the natural process of categorizing, and to map out and examine how their stereotypes are formed and the factors that cause the creation of them. The interviews and the pre- and post-surveys revealed that the students gained a lot of new knowledge from the school project. However, their attitudes suggested they did not gain a new understanding of why Americans vote as they do. This thesis concludes that in order to teach students about attitudes, there must be explicit classroom instruction of IC. Lastly, when students encounter other cultures, ambivalence will most likely occur when the students try to make sense of new knowledge in light of their previous understanding. This ambivalence can go in two directions: one is prejudice, stereotyping, and previous understanding, where the other is new understanding. In this case, teachers’ guidance might be of vital importance, to make sure students to not stick with their prejudices.