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The construct of critical cultural awareness (CCA) is often regarded as an element pertaining to intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997, 2021). In this model, CCA is defined as the ability to "evaluate, critically, and on the basis of a systematic process of reasoning, values in one's own culture and other cultures" (Byram, 2021, p. 90). Although the potential of literature to develop learners' CCA is widely accepted by intercultural education scholars, Byram's definition has some limitations as a theoretical basis for teaching students how to "evaluate and reason critically" about literary texts, as it does not take into account certain aspects of literary reading and critical interculturality that are essential in contemporary foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. This study aims to redefine CCA for the specific context of secondary literature education in a bottom-up manner, based on an analysis of student texts about migratory literature. To this end, 97 students learning Spanish as a FL in the upper forms of pre-university education (aged 15-19) at four schools in the Netherlands were asked to write an evaluation of two literary texts they read in class. Via qualitative analysis of these texts with Atlas.ti, three content categories--social justice, emotions and conflict--and two evaluative categories--cultural representation and transformation--were identified for CCA. The findings of this study have implications for other FL literature teaching settings, as a generic rubric for assessment of student texts was developed based on the criteria that emerged from the data.

Intercultural competence is a crucial element of foreign language education, yet the multifaceted nature of this construct makes it inherently difficult to assess. Although several tools for evaluating intercultural competence currently exist, research on their use in secondary school settings is scarce. This study reports on the development and validation of an instrument intended specifically for use in foreign language literature education. To this end, tangible learning objectives for intercultural literary competence were developed based on five dimensions of intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997) and six categories of literary competence (Witte, 2008). These objectives were re-formulated for implementation in a student questionnaire. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the construct validity of the instrument was investigated among a sample of 164 secondary school students in the upper forms (aged 16-19) of pre-university education in the Netherlands. Although the results supported the hypothesized two second-order factor structure, the model fit indices were less favourable compared to the fit indices of an alternative five first-order factor model. Subsequently, correlation and summability analyses were performed to test the reliability of the instrument. Future research and implications are discussed.

Intercultural competence in foreign language teaching has gained importance in recent times. Although current work has highlighted the advantages of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) for intercultural development, little is known about its potential for teaching literature in secondary schools. Treating literature itself as an art form, the aim of this article is to formulate research-based design principles for an integrated intercultural literary pedagogy (IILP) that may foster intercultural competence through arts integration in foreign language classes. This article reports on the process of evaluating IILP-based pilot lesson materials in pre-university education in the Netherlands. Educational design research was applied as a method that encompasses the systematic study of designing, developing, and evaluating educational interventions through an iterative process of evaluation with stakeholders. Three iterations of formative evaluation were conducted, with additions to the tentative design principles following each of the first two iterations. The process resulted in a set of four refined principles. Results also illustrated the effectiveness of IILP-based lesson materials for intercultural competence. Although participating students encountered some difficulties relating to the functionality of the design, the students appreciated its social relevance and reported that the processing of literary texts through dialogic tasks with peers in the target language fostered intercultural language learning.

This paper deals with a research area of the ERASMUS+ project Developing Teaching Competencies for Extensive Reading Programs (LEELU, 2016-2019), an international teacher training intervention on the topic of extensive or free voluntary reading. Subject-specific pedagogy experiences and insights of teachers who established this programme in German as a foreign language in grade 10 are highlighted. In Italy, the Netherlands and Hungary, teachers brought principles of free voluntary reading into practice and developed them further cooperatively. An open-ended teacher survey reveals the success of the programme. Interview transcripts deepen the results of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]