Professional intercultural communicative competence in action

Abstract

Purpose: This paper investigates the employment of ESL materials for the development of Professional Intercultural Communicative Competence (PICC). This concept was developed by the Erasmus+ funded project “Critical Skills for Life and Work” (CSLW) to capture how intercultural communicative competence can be taught to prepare learners for work in a new cultural context. Design/methodology/approach: In this article, we investigate how the toolkit is used as a resource for teaching PICC by an ESL teacher at a UK charity working with highly skilled migrants and refugees. To do this, we followed a qualitative case study approach and collected multiple sources of data: We conducted an interview with the teacher, learned a lesson in which the teacher used teaching materials from the toolkit, observed how learners engaged with online learner resources and conducted a focus group interview with them after the lesson. Findings: The teacher applied the toolkit by adapting tasks based on their own teaching style and the dynamic of the cohort. The materials aided the teacher in acting as an intercultural mediator: their own experiences and cues from the toolkit facilitated the complex task of unlocking skills and knowledge that students already had and applying these to a new context. Originality/value: The case study shows how freely available materials can support teachers in teaching PICC for cohorts with different levels of language proficiency, career aspirations and experiences.