This study investigates the effects of a CLIL-based literary pedagogy on intercultural competence and language proficiency of 239 students in FLT. Three interventions carried out in two consecutive school years in the upper forms of Dutch secondary schools showed positive effects on intercultural competence development as measured by a validated questionnaire.
In today's globalized world the importance of intercultural competence (IC) cannot be overestimated. The potential of foreign language (FL) literary texts for IC has been emphasised repeatedly (Kramsch, 1993; Hild, 2019). In recent years both institutions such as the Council of Europe as scholars in the field of applied linguistics have also highlighted its essentiality in FL teaching: proposed is that cultural content and language are taught in an integrated way to foster IC (Barrette, Paesani, & Vinall, 2010). This research project departs from the hypothesis that a CLIL-approach to FL literary teaching may contribute to intercultural and language objectives simultaneously. For this purpose an intercultural literary pedagogy (ILP) was developed (Scarino & Liddicoat, 2013)This study investigates the effects of the above-mentioned pedagogy on the IC and language proficiency (LP) of secondary school students in Spanish class. In this quasi-experiment a pretest-posttest design with two conditions was used and a total of 8 teachers and 239 students participated. Three interventions were carried in two consecutive school years in the upper forms of six schools in the Netherlands. In both conditions the interventions consisted of 10 lessons in which a Spanish novel were read in class. For each condition a workbook was developed. The workbook tasks of the experimental condition (N=145) were based on ILP; in the control condition (N=124) the fictional texts were taught in the usual way, i.e. the tasks contained comprehensive questions and personal response exercises. To measure LP standardized and writing tests were used. For measures of IC, the intercultural literary competence questionnaire (ILCQ) was used, an instrument validated in an earlier study (Schat, van der Knaap en de Graaff, submitted). Preliminary results show that the experiment groups went through a significantly higher intercultural development than the control groups. Implications will be discussed for FL curriculum development.
