Intercultural citizenship in foreign language education: an opportunity to broaden CLIL’s theoretical outlook and pedagogy

Abstract

In this article I argue that the theory of intercultural citizenship in language education developed by Michael Byram can contribute to broadening CLIL’s theoretical outlook and pedagogy–two needs for CLIL identified in the literature. I do so by showing that Coyle’s 4Cs framework and Marsh, Maljers and Hartiala’s five dimensions of CLIL coincide with the point of departure of intercultural citizenship theory, which is the notion of intercultural communicative competence. I argue that intercultural citizenship can inform CLIL in theoretical terms as it bridges the 4Cs framework with the recent pluriliteracies CLIL model proposed by Meyer, Coyle, Halbach, Schuck and Ting. It can also inform CLIL pedagogically because it is a recent curricular development that has been tested empirically in language classrooms in 11 countries. Finally, I illustrate my argument with a case study of intercultural citizenship-based CLIL about the Malvinas war carried out in Argentina and Britain in 2012 in the foreign language classroom in higher education, in a type B CLIL language course.