Approach to a Proposal of Criteria to Assess Intercultural Competence in Future Teachers of French as a Foreign Language

Abstract

In foreign language programs, students are trained to understand and produce coherent and grammatically cohesive discourse; however, it is imperative to place greater emphasis on the development and evaluation of intercultural competence. The daily reality and previous studies show that there is not enough training in the area, adequate materials, explicit assessment, and clear criteria for assessing intercultural competence. To begin with, it is essential to be clearer about the concept of intercultural competence, to assume it as the ability to analyze a foreign language and culture with a vision devoid of prejudices, with a realistic and non-idealized dimension of the cultural group under study, adjusting to the foreign interlocutor, modifying one’s criteria and references, recognizing the differences, without judging. For all these reasons, additional training is necessary to know how to guide the development of intercultural competence, especially the study of stereotypes, the parameters of social conventions, and physical and verbal distance. It is concluded that the proposal of criteria to evaluate intercultural competence can be based on the notions of knowing, knowing how to be, knowing how to do, and knowing how to learn to evaluate the performance and attitude of students in concrete communicative situations.