The role of intercultural communicative competence in the development of World Englishes and Lingua Francas

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither).Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resides partly in language, the development of intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997) should play a pivotal role in foreign language education both to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity, facilitating and enhancing intercultural communication in the process. A range of skills considered central to intercultural communicative competence will be presented and illustrated showing how language students can learn to take control over the development not only of language, but of their own identities

Managing the evaluation of difference in foreign language education : a complex case study in a tertiary level context in Japan

In an increasingly interconnected world, people need to learn to respond constructively to cultural difference. Since foreign language learners are regularly presented with cultural differences as a matter of course, foreign language education provides an ideal space within which to explore issues that arise. How should foreign language educators manage the evaluation of difference in foreign language education? I am not aware of any research in this area. Three teaching approaches were identified. Firstly a non-judgemental stance can be adopted with a view to empathising with others intellectually, which requires the development of certain cognitive and communication skills. Secondly a judgemental stance can be adopted with a view to raising unconscious values to the conscious level in order to control them and develop critical cultural awareness. Thirdly, in addition to the second approach, teachers can also attempt to change learner values in support of human rights and the development of democratic society. A complex study based on action research was conducted to examine these teaching approaches in intercultural language education in a tertiary education context in Japan. Qualitative data were gathered over a nine month period from thirty-six student participants and me as teacher-researcher. Data gathered from the student participants indicate that (1) whilst empathy can develop communication skills and self-awareness, some students may also feel insecure about being influenced by others (2) whilst adopting a judgemental stance may empower students to take responsibility for their choices, many Japanese students may reject the process stating cultural preferences for preserving harmony, and (3) student value and concept change is a likely product of encounters with cultural difference regardless of teaching approach. This thesis will present relevant data in context and present a model that integrates all three teaching approaches. Research is called for in relation to value and concept shift in foreign language education that also considers cultural preferences

Managing the evaluation of difference in foreign language education: A complex Case study in a tertiary level context in Japan

In an increasingly interconnected world, people need to learn to respond constructively to cultural difference. Since foreign language learners are regularly presented with cultural difference as a matter of course, foreign language education provides an ideal space within which to explore issues that arise. How should foreign language educators manage the evaluation of difference in foreign language education? I am not aware of any research in this area. Three teaching approaches were identified. Firstly, a non- judgmental stance can be adopted with a view to empathising with others intellectually, which requires the development of certain cognitive and communication skills. Secondly, a judgmental stance can be adopted with a view to raising unconscious values to the conscious level in order to control them and develop critical cultural awareness. Thirdly, in addition to the second approach, teachers can also attempt to change learner values in support of human rights and the development of democratic society. A complex case study based on action research was conducted to examine these teaching approaches in intercultural language education in a tertiary education context in Japan. Qualitative data were gathered over a nine-month period from thirty-six student participants and me as teacher-researcher. Data gathered from the student participants indicate that (1) whilst empathy can develop communication skills and self-awareness, some students may also feel insecure about being influenced by others (2) whilst adopting a judgmental stance may empower students to take responsibility for their choices, many Japanese students may reject the process stating cultural preferences for preserving harmony, and (3) student value and concept change is a likely product of encounters with cultural difference regardless of teaching approach. This thesis will present relevant data in context and present a model that integrates all three teaching approaches. Research is called for in relation to value and concept shift in foreign language education that also considers cultural preferences

Introduction: Arts integration and community engagement for intercultural dialogue through language education

Beyond description, the intensity and complexity of an individual human life deepens over time. Through academic engagement, the lives of teachers, students and researchers sometimes entwine in mutually enriching ways that result in multiple and ongoing personal and social transformations that propel them, and human society itself, forward in both seen and unseen ways that are sometimes beyond control or understanding. This special issue can be characterized as such. Through it, we put on the brakes, and relocate who we are, what we are doing, who we are becoming, and the respective role(s) we want to play in this world. Through compelling narrative, reflecting upon the many years of accumulating influences that have each led us to this resilient and durable point in time and space, we co-editors attempt to create objective, reasoned space through which to voice understandings gained about the complicated nature and relationship of language and the arts that have been culminating in our lives in, around and through our various joint collaboration(s).Fil: Porto, Melina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales; ArgentinaFil: Houghton, Stephanie Ann. Saga University; Japó

BEDD: The MineRL BASALT Evaluation and Demonstrations Dataset for Training and Benchmarking Agents that Solve Fuzzy Tasks

The MineRL BASALT competition has served to catalyze advances in learning from human feedback through four hard-to-specify tasks in Minecraft, such as create and photograph a waterfall. Given the completion of two years of BASALT competitions, we offer to the community a formalized benchmark through the BASALT Evaluation and Demonstrations Dataset (BEDD), which serves as a resource for algorithm development and performance assessment. BEDD consists of a collection of 26 million image-action pairs from nearly 14,000 videos of human players completing the BASALT tasks in Minecraft. It also includes over 3,000 dense pairwise human evaluations of human and algorithmic agents. These comparisons serve as a fixed, preliminary leaderboard for evaluating newly-developed algorithms. To enable this comparison, we present a streamlined codebase for benchmarking new algorithms against the leaderboard. In addition to presenting these datasets, we conduct a detailed analysis of the data from both datasets to guide algorithm development and evaluation. The released code and data are available at https://github.com/minerllabs/basalt-benchmark .Comment: NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Oral. Dataset links are available on Github: https://github.com/minerllabs/basalt-benchmar