Exploring the teaching of culture in the foreign language classroom within the context of collaborative professional development: a critical participatory action research study

ABSTRACT

This article describes the experience of French language teachers as they explored interculturality within a collaborative professional development environment. Participants studied how to design culture lessons for their classrooms through the lens of Intercultural Communicative Competence with the support of theoretical frameworks for intercultural learning. The findings underscore a need for teacher professional development that creates space for teachers to explore topics of interest in an in-depth and collaborative manner, that makes time for exploration of theoretical frameworks, and that models practical strategies for embedding interculturality in curricula. Furthermore, this study reveals that explicit examples of intercultural lessons taught while using the target language are needed in order for language teachers to gain confidence in this area.