Assessing Culture Learning and Intercultural Competence Development

Feb. 4, 2013
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In a recently published book “Language and its cultural substrate: Implications for a globalized world”, Prof. Peter Ecke wrote a chapter about the assessment of culture learning. In a recently published book “Language and its cultural substrate: Implications for a globalized world”, Peter Ecke wrote a chapter about the assessment of culture learning in which he discusses principles that may guide the assessment of culture learning, provides suggestions for the adoption and development of assessment instruments, and presents techniques that may be suitable for the assessment of culture learning in the context of foreign language teaching. The book, edited by Diógenes Cândido de Lima, includes various chapters that deal with the teaching of culture in relation to areas such as pragmatics, translation, phonetics and phonology, intercultural communication, attitude change, cultural identity, cultural believes, and cultural sensitivity, politics of language teaching, world Englishes etc.

Dr. Peter Ecke grew up in Bräunrode, a tiny village, in East Germany. He studied English and Russian at the University of Leipzig (1984-89), Voronezh State University (1986-87), and the Herder-Institute Leipzig (1989-90), and received his “Diplom” in 1989 from the University of Leipzig. He taught German at the University of Southern Mississippi (1990-91) and studied in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona (1991-96). After receiving his Ph.D. (1996), he worked in the Department of Languages and the Master's Program in Applied Linguistics at the Universidad de las Américas–Puebla, Mexico (1996-2000). In 2000, Peter Ecke came to the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor. Here he has served as the Director of the Basic Language Program and since 2003 also as the Director of the Summer Study in Leipzig - Germany Program. He coordinates the first and second-year German language courses, works closely with the department's Graduate Assistants/Associates in Teaching, and teaches German language, linguistics, and applied linguistics courses. He is also a faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. His research interests include psycholinguistics, linguistics, second and third language acquisition and teaching, language attrition, bilingual speech production, lexical errors, word finding problems, mnemonics, and simulation techniques in foreign language teaching. He received research support from the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG), the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), and the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI). His publications appeared as book chapters in: The Multilingual Lexicon, Cross-linguistic Influence in Third Language Acquisition, and as journal articles, e.g., in: International Journal of Bilingualism, Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Die Unterrichtspraxis: Teaching German, Southwest Journal of Linguistics, Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada, MEXTESOL Journal, and Simulation & Gaming.

Reference
Ecke, P. (2012). Assessing culture learning and intercultural competence development. In Diógenes Cândido de Lima (Ed.), Language and its cultural substrate: Implications for a globalized world (pp. 109-124). Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores and Vitória da Conquista, BA: Edições UESB.