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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 purposes involve language learning as an intellectual exercise, the development of a language faculty, and opening (young) people’s eyes to new worlds by introducing them to other countries. Here, we argue that these purposes are reasonable and enriching, but only if they are combined. We suggest that, by taking a humanistic perspective, language teaching can go beyond communication as a dominant purpose. This humanistic perspective is realised through two complementary developments. One is to emphasise that learners are members of various communities, including their local community, their national community, and a world community. The second is to pay attention to the fact that learners bring to the classroom their concerns and fears, especially in times of crisis. Language teachers, who are not only instructors in skills but educators of the whole person, should respond to their learners’ needs both as denizens of their society and as unique individuals. We first explain the theoretical framework and how it has evolved and then describe two experimental projects, one which focuses on the societal needs and one which adds to this a response to the affective needs of learners. We finally discuss how a recent controversy might be addressed in the language teaching class.

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 1920s. Influenced by his experience of frontline warfare as a volunteer driver in France in 1917, Prescott travelled in Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany and Switzerland from September 1926 to June 1927 hoping to see education systems being more internationalist and less chauvinist. He interviewed prominent educationists and observed and interviewed teachers in schools, sending regular reports by letter to his sponsors and then publishing a book Education and International Relations. A Study of the Social Forces That Determine the Influence of Education, in 1930. The analysis of his account of his observations demonstrates that Prescott collected evidence of a growing internationalist approach to education particularly among elementary school teachers. The analysis also relates this to the contemporaneous concern to develop internationalism as a response to the nationalism at the heart of WWI.

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 article analyses the concept of learners' identities against the background of the Council of Europe's policy of social inclusion, which became significant between the dates of publication of the two documents. It demonstrates that the CEFR has a more nuanced and detailed concept of identity than the Companion Volume, and that the suggestion in the Companion Volume that teachers do not need to know the CEFR itself is problematic. The CEFR works with a concept of social and personal identity. The Companion Volume lacks such a concept, and an analysis of pluricultural competence in search of clarification of how a ‘pluricultural person' is conceptualised proves unsuccessful. The relationship between ‘pluricultural' and ‘plurilingual’ is not fully addressed in the CEFR, nor developed further in the Companion Volume. There is still a need for a rich description of the identities of learners and of the notion of pluricultural competence.

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 scaling of competences in the CEFR. The CEFR is used for planning and evaluating curricula, certifications, examinations, textbooks and so on. There is however little attention to the political context of its past and the possible scenarios of its future. Here I locate the CEFR in its political context and purpose, and analyse some of the ideas of its origins. Although time has passed, the contemporary socio-political situation in Europe is such that we should attend to the educational philosophy of the CEFR and consider how it and its companion volume, can be part of the response of language teaching to the demands of our time. Finally, I demonstrate how language teaching can take a proactive role in, and have a much closer relationship with, (active) citizenship and a European, internationalist education for citizenship.

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 service. Leathes was not just a civil servant but also an author on education matters, including language education. His views had appeared in several publications over the previous decade, and many of those views are echoed in the report. This article analyses Leathes’s texts and the parallels in the Leathes Report, especially his vision of ‘Modern Studies’, which linked the teaching of history and modern languages. In doing so, it reveals the origins and gives more detail of the meanings of some of the concepts in the Report. It has been argued that the Report is elitist. Leathes’s own education took place in elite institutions as did that of many other civil servants of the time, but this article shows that it is a misinterpretation to say this led to elitism in the Report when it has in fact a meritocratic view of education, also present in Leathes’s own writings.

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 invalidate the conclusions drawn by them. We correct all of these errors, and suggest that, rather than using Simpson and Dervin’s paper as a source of information about the RFCDC, readers should read the RFCDC itself, before drawing their own conclusions about the RFCDC and the adequacy of the arguments offered by Simpson and Dervin.

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 there in 1997 and how they have changed but stayed the same in their intercultural lives.

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 them in constructive and creative responses to that suffering. We suggest that arts-based methods can be used and illustrate this with an intercultural telecollaboration project created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. In this way language and intercultural communication education can become a site of personal and social transformation albeit modest and piecemeal as part of a longer process. Through arts-based methodologies and pedagogies of discomfort, Argentinian and US undergraduates explored how the theme of the Covid-19 crisis has been expressed artistically in their countries, and then communicated online, using English as their lingua franca, to design in mixed international groups artistic multimodal creations collaboratively to channel their suffering and trauma associated with the pandemic. This article analyses and evaluates the project. Data comprise the students’ artistic multimodal creations, their written statements describing their creations, and pre and post online surveys. Our findings indicate that students began a process of transformation of disturbing affective responses by creating artwork and engaging in therapeutic social and civic participation transnationally, sharing their artistic creations using social media. We highlight the powerful humanistic role of education involving artistic expression, movement, performativity, and community engagement in order to channel discomforting feelings productively at personal and social levels.

Globalization and internationalization have created a need for dialogue 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. Students in an advanced Spanish course volunteered in a school and a legal center, interacting one-on-one with unaccompanied minors and immigrants fleeing Central America. The evaluation focused on the impact on learners’ understanding of the society in which they live, and perceptions of their own language learning during their work as active citizens. Data from students’ academic blogs and diaries were analyzed thematically. They show a heightened awareness of language competence, as students use their knowledge of Spanish in their voluntary work, and increased intercultural competence in students’ reports on their critical evaluation of perspectives and practices in their own culture and those of others.

Resumé

British cultures, or any others, can be studied by those who are native to them or by outsiders, but there are fundamental differences between the two perspectives, one of which is the question of language. Where those studying the culture of a specific social group speak ‘the same’ language as those who are ‘natives’ of the group, they have much easier access. For example, even though the language of a teacher studying the culture of the medical profession, or of a British teacher studying the culture of American teachers, is not identical with the language of the natives of the culture in question, the overlap is considerable. On the other hand, where the students of a culture have access to it through a foreign language, there arise quite different and difficult issues. And here, too, there are degrees of difference, from, for example, access to British cultures for a speaker of French or German to the perspectives facing a speaker of Chinese or Japanese. The complexity of access comprises differences in linguistic structures and distances between cultures.

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.

Traditionally, the notion of citizenship has been linked to the concept of nation, the ‘imagined community’ dependent on a common language. State and nation are assumed to be one: the nation state. The contemporary world has created many other identifications and opportunities for political activities in communities which are transnational. This generates the question of language of communication. The ‘nation state’ has been successful through its education system in imposing a common language within its boundaries. Members of transnational groups therefore bring their own language to interaction, and need to be able to communicate despite the differences. Citizenship across linguistic boundaries thus requires competences of communication as well as those of critical understanding of the conditions under which political activity can take place. Citizenship education prepares young people for political activity up to the level of the state. Foreign language education (FLE) prepares them for interaction with people with another language. The combination of the aims and purposes of citizenship education with those of foreign language education prepares learners for ‘intercultural citizenship’. This chapter summarises current work on intercultural citizenship and competences for democratic citizenship, and thoughts about future directions in which the internationalist educational purposes of FLE might be further realised.