Distinguished Speaker Series: Mike Byram on Intercultural Competence

Have you ever considered how your culture and the community you live in shape your identity, values, beliefs and preferences?

Our cultural preferences influence how we experience the world. From our management and communication styles, our tolerance of uncertainty, how we approach conflict and how we view and deal with authority. It’s what we consider to be moral, ethical, polite and whether we break uncomfortable silences with small talk or wait for our ‘turn’.

Whilst its influence is everywhere, the impact of culture including the misunderstandings which arise when working across cultures, is felt by many of us. Developing your intercultural competence is arguably one of the most valuable skills you can develop for the modern workplace.

Join us at 1:00 pm on Thurs 17 February 2022 for the first of our Distinguished Speaker Series from the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics and hear from world-renowned Emeritus Professor Mike Byram. You’ll learn more about what it means to be interculturally competent and why an ‘internationalist’ approach to working across cultures might be exactly what we all need!   

Register your free place now via Eventbrite.

The talk will be recorded and available on our website post-event. By attending the event you agree to be included in the recording.

About the speaker

Michael Byram studied languages at King’s College Cambridge, wrote a PhD in Danish literature, and then taught French and German in secondary and adult education. He was at Durham University from 1980, where he trained language teachers and researched linguistic minorities and foreign language education. He is now Professor Emeritus there and Guest Research Professor at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria, working on a project on the assessment of the PhD.

In the 2000s he was Adviser to the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe and was recently involved in the CoE’s work on a Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture and the accompanying Portfolio. His most recent joint-authored book is Teaching Intercultural Citizenship Across the Curriculum: The Role of Language Education and he has written a new edition of Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.

Michael introduces his talk as follows:

"As a preliminary to the course on ‘Intercultural Competence in the Workplace’, I will describe and define the notion of Intercultural (Communicative) Competence (I(C)C) as a means of responding to and working with the increasing multiplicity and complexity of interactions across (national and other) boundaries. I(C)C competence can be broken down into learnable competences and I will briefly suggest ways of doing this.

"Secondly - under the theme internationalism - I will locate I(C)C in another result of increasing border-crossing interactions: the contrast between nationalism and internationalism. A key aspect of internationalism is ‘co-operation’ and, though originally a political concept, it is crucial to all international work - as much in the workplace as in politics. I will suggest therefore that an internationalist approach to the workplace is an appropriate basis for the course in question."