Integrating Intercultural Competence into Foreign Language Curriculum through Standards and Assessment

In today’s fast-changing multicultural world, preparing learners to become culturally competent in the target language is considered as an indispensable component of a foreign language curriculum. Then, what does being culturally competent mean for learners? And how do language educators ensure that they are cultivating intercultural communicative competence (ICC)? The workshop will address these issues and proposes as a useful tool a pedagogy that incorporates ACTFL’s Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) and Can-Do Statements for Intercultural Communication. In this workshop, the presenter will: (1) discuss the concept of ICC and issues related to its operationalization, implementation, and assessment, (2) present instructional and assessment tools and demonstrate how multiliteracies activities can be implemented within the IPA, and (3) lead hands-on activities where participants, with the IPA benchmark and Can-Do Statements, will create targeted instruction and assessment types to cultivate and assess ICC with a topic of their choice.