Julie Casoli Uvsløkk

• Uvsløkk, Julie Casoli (2021). Conference paper: Culture, Intercultural Competence and Critical Thinking in Lower Secondary English and French Classrooms in Norway. Vis sammendrag

  How can focusing on culture and intercultural competence help students develop critical thinking skills? In a globalized world, where cross-cultural understanding plays a crucial role in all scopes of life, language teachers are expected to support students in this process. Culture – and in later years to some extent, intercultural competence – has long been part of language instruction alongside vocabulary or grammar. However, when the latter are considered pillars of language learning and teaching, culture and intercultural competence are often overshadowed by the focus on linguistic skills (Heimark, 2013; Vold, 2014). Only a small amount of research concentrates on how culture and intercultural competence within the foreign language and English school subjects are taught in Norwegian classrooms, and even fewer studies have compared across the two subjects. This paper presents findings from the LISE-project, where a team of researchers has filmed naturally occurring instruction over time: four to six lessons have been recorded in language subjects over two school years at seven lower secondary schools in Norway.This presentation will present reflections on how critical thinking is taught as part of culture and intercultural competence based on video-observations of selected English and French lessons in 9th and 10th grades collected by the researchers between 2015 and 2017. Given that there are variations between the English and foreign language curricula and that the general guidelines in the two subjects concerning intercultural competence are vague, this paper will explore the possible impact of these variations and imprecisions on actual teaching situations within and across both school subjects. To what extent are students encouraged to move beyond factual presentations in order to critically reflect upon their own and others’ cultures? Studying these phenomena is crucial in order to develop critical thinking in 21st-century language classrooms.

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