Teaching communicative and intercultural competence

Abstract

A group of 13-year-old English children studying French have received from a partner group in France some materials, produced in English, showing them attitudes to ‘law and order’ in France. They too have prepared and sent materials, in French, for their French partners including: a video of a sketch portraying a series of traffic offences; an audio-taped sketch relating tales of bullying and flouting of school rules; a picture-documentary of police uniforms and equipment (both English and American); an audio-tape of a series of sketches demonstrating different roles of the police; a photo-documentary of the English school demonstrating all the different rules operating there (school rules, rules for the school bus, the role of prefects, school uniform etc). In class they read and discussed – in both French and English – what they had received. Because they had themselves discussed how to make their French peers understand the attitudes of English people, they could compare and contrast but also see how their partners had had to decentre in order to decide what they should send.