Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume:10 Issue: 3, Oct 2022

This introduction to the Special Issue explains the geo-political context in which the contributions have been solicited and written and the policy response of the Council of Europe with which the contributions engage. The presence of war in Europe between Ukraine and Russia, both of which were members of the Council of Europe, is just one element of the threat to democracy. The Council of Europe had already begun work on a framework of reference for teaching democratic and intercultural competences in response to extremist violence in the 2010s and the model produced is all the more important in the current situation. The model – called ‘the butterfly model – lists the values, attitudes, skills and knowledge needed in a pluricultural and democratic Europe as a basis for work in education. In response, the articles introduced here demonstrate how the model can be used in the foreign language classroom and, in two further articles, this work is located in approaches to global education and to the education of teachers.

In this paper we present the analysis and interpretation of data collected during an intercultural virtual exchange undertaken in 2020 in which students from Argentina and the USA explored how trauma and suffering associated with COVID-19 can be channeled through collaborative artistic multimodal creations, and how approaching this in a productive way can lead to self-transformation in terms of intercultural and civic growth.To obtain unbiased data, we did not give the students information on the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC; 2018) which was fundamental to our conceptualization. Here, we apply an ex post facto research method to explore which of the 20 competences for democratic culture included in the RFCDC were mobilized and deployed by our students during this project. We do so by analyzing their multimodal artistic creations, social actions, and their civic statements from the perspective of the RFCDC definitions and descriptors.Findings indicate that the virtual exchange project contributed to the cultivation of ‘democratically and interculturally competent citizens’ as conceptualized in the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture.

This article presents an analysis of a teaching concept we developed based on the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) (Council of Europe, 2018), that not only provides opportunities to practice communicative skills but puts a major focus on democratic competences. Mathematics students and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students from the USA and Germany engaged in a virtual exchange project to reflect upon local and global issues that can be seen from more than one perspective. The topics they chose are all related to the domain of ‘values' in the RFCDC. The students created short stories in which they address these issues and collaborated in the production of a multimodal, digital storybook. The aim of this article is to examine how education for democracy can be fostered through interdisciplinary intercultural citizenship projects. The unit of analysis is the teaching concept, with a focus on the results of the interdisciplinary collaborative process and its outcomes.

Since its inception in 2004, Siena Italian Studies (SIS) has worked to offer students a challenging and engaging intercultural experience thanks to the implementation of the service-learning pedagogy and the practice of reflection combined with language acquisition. Over the years, SIS courses have been aligned with European policies and developments so that students could better understand the impact of their experience and build competences useful for their future as global citizens. For this reason, the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) was incorporated in the syllabus of the renewed reflection course, “Intercultural Dialogue, Democracy and Global Citizenship through Reflection”.The sudden change of habits and perspectives due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 abruptly caused a shift in education. Therefore, proceeding along its ever-evolving path, SIS has come to develop new ways of educating to democracy: a digital and a hybrid reflective course.This contribution will present the Democratic Reflective Syllabus used in the EUFICCS (European Use of Full-Immersion, Culture, Content and Service) approach and compare its in-person version with its two updated versions developed.

This article reports on Higher Education student experiences of engaging with the concepts, values and activities in an adapted pilot version of the Council of Europe’s Portfolio of Competences for Democratic Culture.  Our aim was to explore how this portfolio could serve as a learning tool in an internationalized context for higher education students. The contributions of 32 students undertaking Masters’ programs in a UK university were analyzed by the authors. These are discussed in relation to student development of democratic competences, focusing on citizenship, values and the Portfolio as a learning tool. Participant contributions showed a strong emphasis on valuing cultural diversity together with development of awareness and confidence in owning both the concepts and the process of being a citizen. We conclude that the Portfolio can be seen as a tool for empowerment through validation of participants’ personal experiences and as structural support in articulating these.

Global education is a cross curricular discipline, originating in the 1970s and 1980s, developed for schools by international educators in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. One definition describes it as "education which promotes the knowledge, attitudes and skills relevant to living responsibly in a multicultural, interdependent world" (Fisher & Hicks, 1985, p. 8). Another definition states that "global education consists of efforts to bring about changes in the content, methods and social context of education in order to better prepare students for citizenship in a global age" (Kniep, 1985, p. 15).This article introduces the field of global education, describes its aims and objectives, and outlines the rationale for taking a global education approach to language teaching. It will describe and discuss a variety of initiatives undertaken by global language educators in classrooms, programs and schools around the world that promote democratic citizenship, foster social responsibility and engage students in working to solve local and global issues. It will conclude by encouraging language teachers to explore global education as a valuable cross-curricular approach to language teaching for democracy.

A whole-school approach to foster competences for democratic culture, described by the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture, implies the active involvement of all actors in three areas of school life:  teaching and learning, school governance and culture, and co-operation with the community. The European Centre for Modern Languages’ project Des environnements d’apprentissage optimisés pour et par les langues vivantes (EOL) similarly assumes that a whole-school approach is essential in the promotion of plurilingual and intercultural education in schools. The article illustrates the EOL project: the core principles of its approach, the tools, materials and examples of practices. The project and its follow-up activities have proved that setting up language learning friendly environments requires decisions at different levels so as to introduce mechanisms and routines. Considering language education as a key factor for social cohesion, the aim of the article is to answer the question of what schools should do so as to go beyond a one-off, isolated project to unite all stakeholders around a shared language plan for school, which fosters competences for democratic citizenship.

Making Sense of "Bad English" tries to convey the idea that since language is dynamic, “Good English” or “Bad English” is something relative and subject to changes in accordance with social changes and the speakers in the community. Elizabeth Peterson provides a form of scientific-linguistic tool for language users for a fair judgement of English language varieties before labelling them bad.

Interest in research on bilingual children has witnessed an exponential rise in the last 25 years (Bayram et al., 2018). Based on a broad range of data collection methods, Bilingual Development in Childhood by Annick De Houwer is a well-organized systematic review, explaining how various language learning settings at different stages of childhood dynamically affect bilingual children’s oral language learning trajectories, with a brief examination of the possible role of socioeconomic status in bilingual development. This much needed book comprises 6 chapters and addresses all the fundamentals as well as some critical topics related to child bilingualism.