Michael Byram

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Durham University

The purpose of this article is to examine the ethical challenges that arise in the world language classroom and beyond from using intercultural citizenship pedagogy. Intercultural citizenship is, in general, seen as a recent and positive development in intercultural language education for helping students engage with topics of social significance i...

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is one of the best known publications from the Council of Europe throughout the world (Byram and Parmenter 2012). It is known to the many kinds of readership for which it was designed: language teachers, assessment specialists, policy makers, inspectors, teacher educators and others in...

The work of the Council of Europe in plurilingual and intercultural education is highly influential in Europe and beyond and has been so for many years. The Common European Framework of Reference and its Companion Volume, and related instruments, provide ways in which to implement policies and a broader vision of providing quality and equity in edu...

A comparative analysis of two approaches to education in two academic literatures in two languages is the basis for discussion of how education systems should respond to contemporary transitions in the world in an Anthropocene age. The first approach is based in francophone literature and argues for an 'individual pedagogical education' in contrast...

Our purpose is to trace and explain theoretical and practical developments in foreign/world language teaching over the last decade or more. Language teaching in its modern form, from the Reform Movement of the late 19th century, has focused upon the need for learners to learn or acquire a foreign language in order to use it for communication. Other...

In this article we argue, in the context of the current dominance of the performative and instrumental drives characterizing the accountable university, that language and intercultural communication education in universities should also be humanistic, addressing ‘discomforting themes’ to sensitize students to issues of human suffering and engage th...

Recent articles on the problems of ‘locus of enunciation’ have focused on research and publication as well as on theoretical development of the concept. It is an issue in teaching and learning too, and this is the focus of this article which argues that to reject teaching approaches in ‘the South’ because they come from ‘the North’ is, first, count...

Ragnhild E. Lund attended the first meeting of the group which became known as Cultnet in 1997. This chapter charts some of the changes which have happened in “the cultural dimension” of language teaching since then by comparing the programme and people of 1997 with the same event in 2021. It is completed by some reflections from others who were th...

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages has been a major influence on language teaching in Europe and beyond and its Companion Volume will probably have the same significance. It is important therefore that education professionals understand the underlying concepts, including the conceptualisation of the language user/learner. This...

Described as the magna carta of language teaching, the ‘Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister to enquire into the Position of Modern Languages in the Educational System of Great Britain (28 August 1916)’ is known as ‘the Leathes Report’ after the committee’s chairman, Stanley Leathes, the First Commissioner of the British civil se...

Globalization and internationalization have created a need for dialog among people of different persuasions in our own societies and beyond. Language teachers can meet this challenge through the concepts of intercultural citizenship and intercultural service learning, renewing emphasis on educational and humanistic aims as well as instrumental. Stu...

This article addresses the ways in which education systems responded to the aftermath of World War I with respect to education for nationalism and internationalism. It does so by drawing on theories of internationalism and through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Prescott, an American scholar who toured European schools in the middle of the 19...

This revised edition of Michael Byram’s classic 1997 book updates the text in light of both recent research and critiques and commentaries on the 1st edition. The book is an invaluable guide for teachers and curriculum developers, taking them from a definition of Intercultural Communicative Competence through planning for teaching to assessment.

The CEFR was conceived as part of the Council of Europe’s project ‘Language Learning for European Citizenship’. The social and political context out of which this project grew has often been lost from view. This is perhaps due to the success of the CEFR not only within Europe but also worldwide. That success is largely due to the quality of the sca...

In a recent paper, Simpson and Dervin (2019a) offer a radical critique of the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). However, Simpson and Dervin’s paper contains numerous factual errors, interpretative errors and category errors in its description of the RFCDC. We identify 12 such errors which invalid...

Internationalisation has become a major concern of higher education institutions around the world, featuring as a goal in their mission statements and agendas. Yet, the ways it is perceived and addressed vary greatly. In some cases, internationalisation is viewed as a service to export , whilst in other cases the focus falls on the acquisition and...

As any literature and internet search will show, terms such as 'interculturality’, ‘cross- cultural’, ‘transcultural’ , and ‘intercultural competence’ abound and are used in confusing ways. The phrase ‘intercultural citizenship’ is less widespread but being used increasingly, especially in the field of foreign language education (cf., Byram et al....

This study investigates the use of literary texts for intercultural learning using a Master course of English as a foreign language in Algeria as an empirical example. We first define essential concepts that guided this course - ‘culture’, ‘language-culture nexus’ and ‘intercultural competence’ - before we explain the socio-linguistic and socio-cul...

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) began to have an influence on language teaching some 20 years ago. However, in spite of the title referring to learning, teaching and assessment of languages, the CEFR has had a far more pronounced impact on language testing than on any other aspect of language learning/teaching. In co...

Internationalization is on the lips of educationists, especially those in higher education. It is a phenomenon throughout the world, and though there are variations in the practice, there is much similarity in the rhetoric. In practice, internationalization has largely, until recently, been a matter of structural changes rather than having an effec...

The strong interest in intercultural competence—and related concepts such as transcultural competence—reflects the response to economic and other global changes which have, in many countries, increased mobility motivated by trade and, increasingly, by study abroad. Intercultural competence facilitates success in these endeavors, and is best defined...

This volume challenges traditional approaches to foreign language education and proposes to redefine them in our age of international migration and globalization. Foreign language classrooms are no longer populated by monolingual students, but increasingly by multilingual students with highly diverse language backgrounds. This necessitates a new un...

Internationalisation in higher education is now a worldwide phenomenon but there is little attention paid to internationalisation at doctoral level, although this phenomenon has grown exponentially in recent years. This study focuses on a university in China to examine how international doctoral students and their supervisors perceive supervision a...

The purpose of this special issue is to bring the theory of intercultural citizenship education to readers’ attention and to offer teachers and researchers working with this or similar concepts the opportunity to make their work known in a context of a coherent presentation of theory and practice. In this introduction, we will explain the rationale...

This essay is an attempt to introduce into the discourse of Foreign Language Education the concept and phenomenon of internationalism. It begins with an analysis of the ways in which education systems promote nationalism and "national citizenship," and suggests that an internationalist perspective would enrich this tradition in education. It contin...

Purpose This paper aims to argue for the significance of internationalism for the internationalisation of higher education. It analyses some conceptualisations and definitions of internationalisation before explaining the concept of internationalism, and variations of it, to demonstrate that internationalism has a moral dimension which could, and...

Volume 3 of the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture offers guidance on how the competences might be used in six education contexts. The Framework itself comprises three volumes and is offered as an instrument to help inspire individual approaches to teaching competences for democratic culture while adhering...

Here is a sharing link: http://rdcu.be/I2hd Language teaching has long been associated with teaching in a country or countries where a target language is spoken, but this approach is inadequate. In the contemporary world, language teaching has a responsibility to prepare learners for interaction with people of other cultural backgrounds, teaching...

This ground-breaking book is the first to describe in detail how teachers, supported by university educators and education advisers, might plan and implement innovative ideas based on sound theoretical foundations. Focusing on the teaching and learning of intercultural communicative competence in foreign language classrooms in the USA, the authors...

How doctoral researchers (and their supervisors) experience and conceptualise the process of becoming a researcher and the identifications that are enacted during the process has hitherto been researched only in terms of disciplinary and professional identities. Yet, within Europe, the creation of a common Higher Education Area has a potential impa...

Service Learning, a pedagogy combining formal learning with community service, has recently developed into Intercultural Service Learning (ISL). Intercultural Citizenship Education (ICE) combines foreign-language education and education for (intercultural) citizenship. They have different origins and applications but recent work in ISL is linked to...

This study, developed in the context of the project “Internationalising the curriculum: towards global education in pre-service teacher training”, aimed to support teacher educators in embedding a ‘global outlook’ in their teaching practice. The project included collaborative working sessions, during a period of 13 months, and was structured as par...

The contributors to this volume have collaborated to present their work on introducing competences in intercultural communication and citizenship into foreign language education. The book examines how learners and teachers think about citizenship and interculturality, and shows how teachers and researchers from primary to university education can w...

This study aims to understand stakeholders’ representations of internationalization at the University of Aveiro. In order to meet this goal an ethnographic case study, which included open-ended interviews to various stakeholders of the institution, was carried out. An exploratory content analysis of the data suggests that stakeholders still have a...

Illustrated by an empirical study of English as a Foreign Language reading in Argentina, this book argues for a different approach to the theoretical rationales and methodological designs typically used to investigate cultural understanding in reading, in particular foreign language reading. It presents an alternative approach which is more authent...

Internationalisation is high on the agenda of higher education institutions across the world. Previous research on national and local policies surrounding this phenomenon has identified different discourses of internationalisation which may have an effect on practices such as student mobility. In order to understand better the role of student mobil...

The purpose of the project described here is to demonstrate how the introduction of subject matter and principles from citizenship education into foreign language education combines objectives from both in order to give meaning to language education on the one hand and extend citizenship education beyond a focus on the local and the national on the...

At the end of the introduction to Researching Cultures of Learning, the editors suggest that this book can be usefully seen in conjunction with two others, one from 2011 entitled Researching Chinese Learners and one from 2013 (i.e. the same year as Researching Cultures of Learning) entitled Researching Intercultural Learning. Although there is no e...

At the editor's invitation this article was written as an analysis of the development of the intercultural dimension of foreign language teaching over the last 25 years. It is in part a personal reflection based on an article written for this journal 25 years ago, but it also draws on comments and insights from a network of researchers with whom th...

This text argues for the full integration of intercultural competence as a core element within the education system. It offers an educational rationale and conceptual framework for the development of intercultural competence, a clear description of its constitutive elements to be developed in and through education, and an overview of a variety of p...

Culturally responsive teacher, Intercultural competence, teacher education handbook for continued professional development (CPD), diversity education, democracy and human rights education

In the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in recent decades - in theory if not yet in practice - the crucial question is 'What should a language teacher's aims be?' This will be the main focus of this paper. There are however other questions which are frequently raised in the new context, questions about the relationships among 'language', 'iden...

The title of this new journal provides opportunity to review the many contexts which need to be taken into account in reflecting upon foreign language teaching. These contexts include the educational, the fact that much language teaching takes place within general educational and often compulsory educational settings and institutions. Learners thus...

Citizenship education, whether under this label or under some other, such as “civics,”“education civique” or “politische Bildung,” has a long history; the field is also attracting increasing contemporary interest and, therefore, a source of growing academic literature. The recent appearance of a Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy m...

“Cultural awareness,” as a quick Internet search will show, is a widely used phrase and consequently has no single precise meaning. It is used to refer to awareness of diversity within a society and among societies. It is often associated with “training,” involving specific activities which draw attention to diversity and encourage and deliberately...

“Intercultural competence” has become a sufficiently established phrase to justify the publication of a handbook (Deardorff, 2009). “Intercultural” as a term in language teaching emerged in the 1980s as a development of the concept of “communicative competence,” which was by then widely agreed to be the aim of foreign-language teaching and learning...

The vexed question of the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘culture’ will be the starting point. I do not propose to ‘resolve’ the question but to consider some ways in which relationships between cultural awareness and language awareness might be conceptualised and then have some impact on language education. By ‘language education’ I refer to...

Language Policy DivisionDirectorate of Education and Languages, DG IVCouncil of Europe, Strasbourg

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages was published a decade ago and has been influential ever since, not only in its European 'home' but throughout the world. This book traces the processes of the influence by inviting authors from universities and ministries in 11 countries to describe and explain what happened in their case. T...