Building Blocks for Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence—New!
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Length:
1-Week
Format:
In-Person
Instructors:
Julie Sykes and Stephanie Knight
Julie Sykes & Stephanie Knight
To build Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence (IPIC), learners must understand and navigate the contextualized nature of communication and communication norms. This ability empowers learners to participate meaningfully in the language communities of their choice and in the world more broadly.
Building a lexicon in the target language is an insufficient vehicle for navigating communication norms. Through its focus on pragmatics, an area of linguistics that examines how meaning is made in a given context, this hands-on institute will support participants in gaining understanding of the infinite ways in which individuals from different backgrounds may communicate. Specifically, participants will explore four key pragmatic concepts that influence communication choices across languages (power, politeness, imposition, and social distance) and discover how the differences in these choices operationalize across individuals, language varieties, and languages. They will use this understanding to articulate and iterate instructional and assessment materials that can be applied to their own contexts.
This institute is co-sponsored by the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS)
at the University of Oregon.
Target Audience:
This institute is open to all educators interested in prompting the development of intercultural competence in their classroom. Both pre- and in-service professionals are invited to attend.
Program Schedule
9 a.m.–4 p.m. (Central Time)
Day 1
Tenets of Intercultural Communication
- Defining power, social distance, imposition, and politeness
- Exploring locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary forces
- Recognizing diverse communicative repertoires, norms, and expectations
Day 2
(Inter)Culturally Sustaining Instructional Practices
- Language myths
- The Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence (IPIC) Framework
- The interplay of culturally sustaining pedagogies and IPIC
Day 3
(Inter)Culturally Sustaining Instructional Practices
- Articulating IPIC-based learning outcomes
- Authentic resources and repositories
- Affordances and limitations of digital media (AI, social media, games)
Day 4
(Inter)Culturally Sustaining Assessment Practices
- Interplay of motivation and assessment infrastructures
- Culturally sustaining, effective assessment practices
- Strategies for articulating and providing feedback
Day 5
(Inter)Culturally Sustaining Enaction
- Review core pragmatic concepts
- Activity and assessment infrastructure iteration
- Approaches to reflection
Instructors
Julie M. Sykes is the Director of the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon and the Chief Innovation Officer at LingroLearning. Her research focuses on applied linguistics and second language acquisition with an emphasis on technological and pedagogical innovation for interlanguage pragmatic development and intercultural competence.
Stephanie W.P. Knight is the Associate Director of CASLS. Her research and development of pedagogical interventions focuses on constructivist approaches to language acquisition and the intentional incorporation of digital and mixed-reality tools in learning experiences to expand learning outcomes.