Songul Dogan Ger: Developing Students’ Cultural Diversity Awareness and Intercultural Communicative Competence in English Classes
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7 The Place of Culture in Teaching Materials Used in an International School in Budapest – Data Source 3: Teaching Materials Analysis
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7.3 Findings
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7.3.3 The Components of ICC
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7.3.3.1 Components of Intercultural Communication in the Year 5 Materials

7.3.3.1 Components of Intercultural Communication in the Year 5 Materials

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The Year 5 teaching materials reflected varying degrees of engagement with the key components of ICC as defined by Byram (1997) and Barrett et al. (2014), including attitudes, knowledge and understanding, skills of discovery and interaction, interpreting and relating, linguistic skills, critical cultural awareness, and action. These components were unevenly distributed across the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry units, with nonfiction materials showing the strongest alignment with the full ICC framework.

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Attitudes—particularly empathy, acceptance, and respect—were cultivated through imaginative and expressive tasks across the fiction and nonfiction materials. In fiction, students were encouraged to dramatise scenes, improvise dialogue, and respond creatively to characters’ thoughts and feelings. Tasks such as “How do you think character X is feeling now?” were commonly used to prompt emotional engagement. Similarly, nonfiction units—especially those centred on migration and immigration—developed empathy by inviting students to respond to real-life stories with personalised projects, such as letters and posters expressing solidarity with migrants facing hardship. These activities not only encouraged perspective-taking but also promoted emotional connection with unfamiliar experiences.

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Knowledge and understanding were supported through both content delivery and inquiry tasks. Fiction materials offered brief contextual notes about the historical and social setting of the texts, although these were less developed compared to later Key Stages. However, students were regularly asked to investigate topics related to war, geography, or culture, thus expanding their knowledge through independent research. Nonfiction materials provided more substantial content, including key terms, historical timelines, and multimodal sources such as blogs, poems, and video excerpts. These were supplemented with classroom and homework tasks that deepened students’ understanding of cultural contexts, especially those involving migration and colonial histories.

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Skills of discovery and interaction were prominently featured, particularly in fiction and nonfiction units. Every fiction lesson included a research activity that required students to gather information from websites, videos, or supplementary texts. Learners were expected to share their findings through group discussions or short presentations, reinforcing both exploratory and collaborative skills. The nonfiction materials reinforced this pattern by integrating discovery tasks within cultural inquiry, encouraging students to explore unfamiliar settings, languages, or perspectives and to bring their findings into the classroom dialogue.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

In contrast, skills of interpreting and relating were less frequently developed. Only one fiction unit explicitly required students to identify features of Gothic tradition and relate them to contemporary British settings. This narrow application restricted the opportunity for comparative interpretation across cultures. Interpreting and relating skills were largely confined to the target culture, thus limiting learners’ ability to make cross-cultural connections or interrogate cultural assumptions.

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Linguistic and discourse skills, as expected under the national curriculum’s emphasis, were systematically embedded throughout the fiction and nonfiction materials. Students engaged in structured tasks to develop reading, writing, listening, and speaking, alongside targeted grammar, spelling, and vocabulary instruction. Idioms, proverbs, and stylistic devices—particularly those found in Shakespeare, Dahl, and Rowling—were explained and analysed. Poetry materials also included metaphor and symbolism interpretation tasks, further reinforcing discourse-level competence. These activities formed the backbone of ICC development in Year 5, although they primarily supported language learning rather than intercultural reflection.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The critical cultural awareness and political education component was largely absent from the fiction and poetry units. However, it emerged more clearly in the nonfiction materials, particularly those dealing with migration. One narrative, describing a Caribbean girl’s migration to Britain, prompted students to consider experiences of racism, cultural dislocation, and media bias. Follow-up activities encouraged students to discuss the meaning of multiculturalism and question dominant narratives. In doing so, these materials allowed for the development of critical reflection—albeit limited to a small subset of texts.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The final ICC dimension, action, was minimally addressed in Year 5 but was present in the nonfiction materials. Students were invited to demonstrate their support for migrants by designing a project or writing empathetic letters. While these tasks fostered moral engagement and active positioning, they remained largely symbolic. Action as a sustained behavioural or civic response was not consistently promoted across the materials and was entirely absent from fiction and poetry units.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Taken together, the Year 5 materials introduced ICC components in fragmented and uneven ways. While linguistic and cognitive skills were systematically prioritised, the affective and critical dimensions of ICC—particularly deep cultural reflection and transformative action—were underdeveloped. Nonfiction materials, with their real-world focus and cross-cultural narratives, provided more fertile ground for empathy, discovery, and critical awareness. Fiction and poetry units were richer in language development and literary appreciation but less effective in fostering ICC holistically. These findings suggest that even at early stages of language learning, opportunities exist to embed a more intentional, balanced, and scaffolded approach to CDA and ICC—one that goes beyond content delivery and targets learners’ intercultural understanding and agency.
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