It’s a great year to be involved with communicative competence! In March many of us had the privilege of attending the TESOL convention in Toronto. The plenary session featured an energetic discussion between Jun Liu, Lourdes Ortega, and Michael Byram on the topic of “Redefining Communicative Competence and Redesigning ELT in the 21st Century.” I wish to highlight a few things I took away from this discussion.

• Early models of communicative competence may be incomplete in that they lack a strong component for intercultural communication. It is not enough for students to just learn about culture. Students need to acquire skills that help them to have intercultural competence.

• Teachers can’t help students be interculturally competent unless the teachers themselves are interculturally competent. Are you interculturally competent? What can you improve on?

• A native English speaker does not necessarily make a good intercultural communicator. We need “mediators” between cultures, and sometimes nonnative English speakers can be better as mediators between cultures than native English speakers can be.

It was nice to hear at the plenary session that the work we do in our Interest Section is so important to our field! I hope this can reinvigorate our desire to contribute to the community and make a difference in the lives of our students.

Austin Pack

Community Manager

Austin Pack currently teaches intercultural communication and study abroad preparation classes for Shantou University, in Shantou, China. His professional interests include language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, social linguistics, and outdoor education. Outside the classroom he enjoys the outdoors, playing the guitar and ukulele, and spending time with his family.