Navigating intercultural language teaching in New Zealand classrooms

Abstract

Intercultural capability, or the ability to relate comfortably with people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, is increasingly recognised as a key twenty-first century competency. The importance of its development in the context of learning a language has long been acknowledged in the literature. However, practitioners worldwide struggle with the implementation of interculturally focused language teaching. This paper reports aspects of a study designed to support New Zealand intermediate school teachers to develop their students’ intercultural capability through learning a language. The paper focuses on two teachers of Mandarin, one a non-native and the other a native speaker, working in different teaching contexts. The findings indicate that both teachers struggled with similar challenges: the fear of exposing students to stereotypes; uncertainty about target language use for intercultural topics; and finding a balance between language and culture in their language programmes. Implications for moving towards young language learners’ intercultural capability are raised.