Intercultural Learning in English as Foreign Language Instruction: The Importance of Teachers’ Intercultural Experience and the Usefulness of Precise Instructional Directives

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 26, Issue 8,
Author(s): Kerstin Göbel and Andreas Helmke, ' Intercultural Learning in English as Foreign Language Instruction: The Importance of Teachers’ Intercultural Experience and the Usefulness of Precise Instructional Directives', Pages 1571-1582, Copyright Elsevier (November 2010).

This paper focuses on the teaching of intercultural topics in the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) at German schools.

The article presents the results of an analysis of data from a larger study, DESI study – Assessment of Student Achievements in German and English as a Foreign Language.
The study examined the intercultural experience of teachers and observable aspects of instruction.

Videotapes of EFL-classroom instruction of 9th and 10th grade students are analyzed in order to assess characteristic of the implementation of intercultural topics.

The findings reveal the impact of teachers’ intercultural experience on the quality of their intercultural instruction.
Furthermore, the results indicate that precise external directives for particular lessons can help teachers put intercultural topics into practice.