Beyond Babel: Linguistic and intercultural skills for tomorrow
Today’s post is written by Anne-Lise Prigent, the editor in charge of education publications at OECD Publishing. Tonight, the OECD is hosting a conference on how multilingualism can improve communication by enriching thought.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, Wittgenstein said. This limit holds for English, the world’s lingua franca. In 2006, the British Council warned that “monoglot English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual youngsters from other countries are proving to have a competitive advantage (…) in global companies”.
The world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting, and so is its linguistic landscape, as the OECD’s Trends Shaping Education points out: “English was long the dominant language of the Internet, but that is changing. There are now over 250 languages represented on the Internet, with English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish making up the top five.”
Mandarin now is the most widely spoken language in the world, followed by English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French. The relative number of English native speakers will decrease whereas Spanish, Hindi and Arabic will soar. The number of non-native English speakers will overtake that of native speakers over the next century.
Androulla Vassiliou, EU Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth thinks that languages can help us out of the crisis. She stresses that Europeans need better language skills to answer labour markets’ needs. In 2011, only 42% of European 15-year-olds were competent in their first foreign language, with huge variations between, say, Sweden (82%) and Britain (9%).
In a context of increasing global competition, language skills are becoming crucial. A survey of SMEs found that a significant amount of business is being lost because of inadequate language skills. Read more...

By Keith Bradsher. Zhang Xiaoping’s mother dropped out of school after sixth grade. Her father, one of 10 children, never attended. But Ms. Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has never seen before.
A ponytailed junior at a new university in southern China, Ms. Zhang has a major in English. But her unofficial minor is American pop culture, which she absorbs by watching episodes of television shows like The Vampire Diaries and America’s Next Top Model on the Internet. Read more...

In this article Dine Brinkman of the Wageningen University, describes the evolution, tasks and scope of the Team Intercultural Dialogue and explores its relevance and main results.
The Team Intercultural Dialogue has been created by the Executive Board of Wageningen UR to advise on intercultural issues and to strengthen the dialogue between the richness of cultures within the Wageningen UR community. Both staff and students participate in the team. Intercultural dialogue is defined as a process that promotes an open and respectful interaction between individuals and groups with different cultural backgrounds. The Team has developed plans to create the conditions for intercultural dialogue and suggest solutions for problems in the event they occur. Read more...

In this interview, Daniel Mato presents the Project “Cultural Diversity, Interculturality and Higher Education" of the International Institute of UNESCO for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), which analyzes the current demands and access conditions of Indigenous and Afro-Descendant students within the different types of Latin American Higher Education Institutions, and assesses their impact, responsibilities and challenges in regards to intercultural education, amongst other issues.
What is the “Project on Cultural Diversity, Interculturality, and Higher Education" about?
The Project “Cultural Diversity and Interculturality in Higher Education in Latin America” of the Instituto Internacional de la UNESCO para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe (IESALC) was created to identify, document and analyze experiences of higher education that are committed to meeting the needs, demands and proposals for higher education among indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. The Project thereby seeks to lay the necessary groundwork to inform policy recommendations, generate criteria for the production of statistics and indicators on the field’s development, identify topics of interest for new research projects, and contribute to the development of sustainable collaboration mechanisms between the institutions studied and others with similar interests.
The project is not only about limiting the field of work to the experiences of higher education specifically directed to indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities, but to extend the need of intercultural education to all levels and to all population in Latin America, as many of these experiences point out. The idea of intercultural education for all was explicitly endorsed by the Higher Education Regional Conference (CRES 2008), celebrated in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) in July 2008. There, 4,500 experts met to create a platform to enhance the development of higher education in Latin America. This was significant because societies in Latin America are pluricultural, for which higher education must incorporate wisdom and knowledge from indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities. It would be “silly” not to do so.
It is also “silly” the fact that conflict resolution modalities of indigenous and Afro-Descendant peoples in the Americas are being studied but not taught. They are only taught in anthropology schools, but not in Law schools. There is a lot of knowledge of indigenous peoples that is of national interest. It is not only about including wisdom and knowledge of these peoples as a sort of favor to them, but also as a favor to all of us. There are two main reasons to include this wisdom and knowledge: mere intelligence (let’s not waste this knowledge), and the fact that we are not ensuring that the established rights by law in constitutions are upheld. Read more...

By Kirsti Miettinen, kirsti.miettinen@aalto.fi, Petri Lyytikäinen, petri.lyytikainen@aalto.fi, Tapio Koskinen, tapio.koskinen@aalto.fi, Aalto University Professional Development Aalto PRO. Companies that need training and development services increasingly operate in more than just one country, language and culture. Succeeding in a complex, multinational, customer-tailored training project takes more than a good concept. The concept must be flexible so that changes from country to country do not endanger the content to be delivered. There can be several localised versions of the training concept under simultaneous delivery. The challenge is how to manage the concept. Download the Document.
8. Training Partner Support Meets Multicultural Business Environment
Different business cultures and variations in company size from one country to another, as well as different learning and teaching cultures make the roll-out of courses very challenging. Furthermore, the need to deliver each course in the mother tongue of the participants makes it difficult to achieve the economies of scale.
The regional training partner has to be able to establish an open and firm relationship and dialogue with the local company management. It is necessary to have both parties communicating and planning the training together in order to understand what country-specific adjustments must be made in the training content. This increases the usefulness of the training. The risk is to make the training too country-specific and thus forget the overall picture i.e. harmonising the project business.
Too strong and wilful leadership in local customer organisation can make the implementation of the concept difficult. There is a risk that the training designed is not what they (country managers) think they need most. The training was intended to support the change management of the company. The training was to soften the adaptation of new ways of doing business. Resistance to the change direction can make them doubtful not only of the new concept but also of the training.
It is of utmost importance that already before the training starts, the country managers and the local champions (local owners of the concept) are committed to the new concept and procedure. Not only should the lingual translation of the Company’s new concept be ready before training in each country, but also the localisation should be finalized (by company in-house professionals). This cannot be overemphasised because we found lack of localisation being one of our major challenges during roll-outs.
The maturity of the business practices and normal cultural aspects in doing business can bring unexpected challenges to the delivery of the project. Issues that are easy to implement in one country can become difficult obstacles in another country. This requires a lot of time and energy from the regional partner and project management, if the difficulties had not been anticipated in time. A good understanding of the local business culture and open-mindedness to face unexpected challenges rising from e.g. resistance or misunderstanding of concepts are of great help when overcoming unexpected challenges. Continuous support for the regional partner from the central project management is a necessity. The best, and perhaps the only way, to ensure the quality of the training adaptation to the local level is to work only with subcontractors (local universities and training organisers) with whom you have had a long experience in collaboration. A long collaboration in training partnership with the customer makes it possible to acquire adequate and honest feedback for the training delivery abroad. Project management and the steering group are able to re-engineer a process control system on the run.
In our case, the major project management challenge came from the demanding roll-out schedule. When managing training carried out in 15 countries during 24 months and based on a concept designed and tested during a pilot phase in a couple of countries and re-engineered in every new country, you need to be active in keeping each partner updated on new amendments to the concept and content. It is also essential that your partners are flexible and ready to change their preliminary plans for delivery when the next generation concept is released. Download the Document.

“Crossing your boundaries by making the unknown familiar”: international or intercultural experiences in the higher education sector in Belgium.
By Dirk Van Waelderen, Mobility Coordinator, Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, www.hubrussel.be/english. Nowadays there are many ways for students to gain an international experience before they start their careers. The most common way in Europe is probably the Erasmus programme which offers study exchanges or traineeships. In this European programme students stay abroad for at least several months. The advantages of an international experience are manifold. According to many studies on the impact of a student exchange, the students improve their cultural and creative reflexes, their linguistic proficiency and their international skills. Complementing the educational gains are the advantages obtained when entering the labour market. It is vital in the training of students to broaden their familiar surroundings by crossing the traditional boundaries of their study or living environment. By learning to think outside the box, students are then able to achieve the foundations of an enhanced creativity and innovation. More...

By Chantal Barry, EAIE Trainer. EAIE training courses have many particularities, one of them being that they always take place in an intercultural, multi-lingual environment. This is of course part of what makes them so interesting, and also at times so challenging.
After being a trainer in such an environment for almost two decades, I realise that I will never finish learning what needs to be learned in such a context – and thank goodness!
For me, one of the extraordinary advantages of being a trainer is that I learn something new about one culture or another every single time I undertake such a course. I suppose that is what makes the experience so rich. Do you also share this feeling?
At the recent EAIE ‘Train the Trainers’ event hosted by Maastricht University Campus Brussels, Phil Conroy had a lot of tips about assessment and evaluation and Barbara Boldt had some very helpful ideas about the use of visual aids.
Assessment and evaluation
One of the areas I see as particularly challenging is evaluating how course participants are doing. People from certain cultures will not hesitate in answering if you ask the question ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘Is that clear to everyone’? but there are cultures where this might be difficult to do. There may also be cultural mixes where one might answer a question in front of people from one’s own culture but feels less comfortable about doing so in front of people from elsewhere for a variety of reasons. Phil Conroy’s ideas on building an assessment plan for international training courses were very interesting. The assessment plan might include exercises which show whether the learning point has been understood or not, one-on-one discussions, monitored group work etc. This is certainly an area that needs careful thought. Do you have other examples of successful evaluation methods?
Visual aids
Another area of particular interest is the use of visual aids. Again, in the types of classrooms we train in, intercultural means multi-lingual and here, correctly used visual aids play a really strong role. They can be used next to words or expressions that might be difficult to explain or understand. Pictures can be used very effectively to get a whole concept across. Barbara Boldt had a lot to say about this – even when there are no language difficulties, pictures can really help to ensure understanding when exhaustion from a full day’s work in a non-native language sets in.
Cultural sensitivity
Finally, even though we all pride ourselves on cultural sensitivity (and usually rightly so) there are still times when things can go wrong. Certainly in my case I’ve seen it happen in a classroom situation where a debate has become difficult between participants because of a conflict in value systems or even because history has raised its head… Do you have any examples of such situations and how you dealt with these types of issues? Please post your comments below!

Presque trente ans après le n° 75 d’Education permanente (« Les transferts de connaissances. Vers une pédagogie interculturelle ? », 1984), le terme interculturel est devenu omniprésent en politique, en formation, en recherche, dans les discours du quotidien, et semble être accepté comme une évidence. Cela n’évite cependant pas les malentendus et l’on constate la persistance d’un interculturel simpliste et réducteur. De nombreux chercheurs et formateurs prennent en otage les concepts de culture (nationale) et d’identité culturelle pour former des typologies et des classifications d’altérité. Ces éléments prétendent expliquer, dans une logique causaliste, les relations qui s’établissent entre individus issus de pays et de langues différents. Cela correspond pleinement au « terrorisme de la cohérence » (Maffesoli) caractéristique de la modernité.
Lire les résumé.
L'interculturel en formation, un concept à renouveler, Marie-José Barbot, Fred Dervin, De l’interculturel à l’humanisme du divers, Martine Abdallah-Pretceille, Individus, (inter)cultures et politique, Bernard Lahire, L'altérité, Yasmina Picquart, L’exil, l’asile, le refuge : les lieux de l’étranger, Michel Agier, Désirs altruistes sous les tropiques, Nadège Chabloz, Vers l’interculturel : les enfants roms à l’école, Jean -Pierre Liégeois, Discriminations, gestion de la diversité et management interculturel, Philippe Pierre, Moments d’interculturalité et processus de transformation, Hervé Breton, Noël Denoyel, La formation interculturelle mise au travail de la reconnaissance, Claude Debon, Autoformation mondialoguante, voyage et passage à la retraite, Gaston Pineau, Une pédagogie de l’égalité. Entre nuance et complexité, Mariela De Ferrari, Accueil et autonomisation : enseigner le français à des demandeurs d’asile, Véronique Laurens, Autoformation mondialoguante et exploration de l’écoformation, Pascal Galvani, Une rencontre interculturelle spécifique : le conseil en autoformation institutionnelle, Marie-José Gremmo, Le stage de la gloutte : un contexte de formation singulier, Carole Dolignon, Philippe Lain, Analyser le travail de tuteurs d’enseignants débutants, Stéphane Brau-Antony, Claire Mieusset, Agnès Lenfant-Corblin, Catherine Miot.Journée de réflexion et de débats autour du n° 186 d'Education permanente, le 22/06/2011 - CNAM (Paris).