IEREST and language teaching at IALIC 2014

A study conducted by Ana Beaven and Lucia Livatino and based on the IEREST teaching resources was presented at the 14th international conference of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), Aveiro (Portugal) 28-29-30 November 2014. The conference theme was “Linguistic resources and intercultural (communicative) conference: bridging a theoretical and empirical gap”, which seemed ideal to present the adaptation of some of the IEREST pre-departure activities for the foreign language classroom. The talk is titled “Teaching the intercultural in the language classroom: insights from the IEREST project”: In the IEREST activity analysed, the learners engage with other mobile students through the task of carrying out an interview from potentially non-essentialist perspectives. The foreign language is thus seen not as an aim in itself, but as the means to develop the learners’ intercultural communication skills.