The mysteries of bilingualism: unresolved issues

Abstract

English language course for Chinese EFL students’ ICC development, while in Chapter 14 Oleksak and Cardettti address a critical issue in sustaining language teachers’ efforts to promote students’ ICC development. This chapter offers critical details for readers who are interested in creating and sustaining interdisciplinary communities of practice for language teachers and educators across disciplines to work together in facilitating students’ ICC and intercultural citizenship development. Applying Byram’s intercultural learning scholarship in teaching high school German, Wagner, and Alvarez Valencia (Chapter 15) discuss the promotion of intercultural citizenship and intercultural humility, emphasizing the need to develop open-mindedness and respect towards cultures that are different from our own. The chapter contains detailed descriptions of pedagogical activities, and it also documents a teacher’s reflective engagement with intercultural teaching in facilitating students’ critical investigation of their own beliefs and convictions. In Chapter 16 Porto and Di Bin further theorize intercultural citizenship in terms of internationalism, imagined communities, and ecological citizenship in an Argentine secondary school. Porto and Di Bin collected and interpreted rich evidence from their project to argue that students can ‘[think and act] in an internationalist way through engagement with texts of all kinds and interaction with peers in their social milieu’, just as if they met and interacted with ‘people from a different country’ (307). The final chapter is an account by Wang on Professor Byram’s engagement with the Chinese academic community. China offers an illustrative case to show the global influence of Byram’s ICC scholarship on students, teachers, teacher educators, academic researchers and policy makers alike. Due to the profound impact of Byram’s scholarship on learning and teaching internationally, it came as no surprise to find a few touching commentaries on Professor Byram’s scholarship from his colleagues. These commentaries highlight what kind of person Professor Byram is and help readers to appreciate that the essence of Byram’s ICC scholarship is more about personhood than competence, knowledge, and skill. We fully appreciate the challenges in achieving a comprehensive coverage on the global impact of Byram’s ICC scholarship in one volume, but it would be great for the volume to include one or two chapters from contributors based in contexts such as Africa and Middle East. Having said this, the volume confirms that Byram’s ICC scholarship continues to offer a springboard for researchers to critique, refine, and propose new ideas for research and teaching, with a lasting and significant impact on language learning and teaching practices. We believe that these conceptual and pedagogical innovations will continue to transform the landscape of language education in the coming decades.