An Educational Tool for the Assessment of Cross-linguistic and Intercultural Mediation Competences (CLAIM-tool). (CLAIM-tool)

Intercultural competence (IC) is increasingly recognized as a core competence to be developed through formal education in order to prepare learners for a successful life and career in an intercultural world. These days, teachers and educational institutions are facing a challenging task of defining and assessing intercultural learning outcomes, especially as available IC assessment tools and frameworks are under fire by many experts in the field, who continuously stress the urgency to develop more valid and reliable measures to assess IC. So far, criticism by IC experts has been presented in the form of detailed feedback on available IC assessment tools accompanied by suggestions for the development of better assessment tools, yet, up to this date, and despite urgent calls on the matter, no attempts have been made to actually develop and test such a tool. Hence, the proposed CLAIM-Tool project aims to present a solution to an imperative and critical matter in intercultural education by producing an IC assessment tool based on the extant wealth of feedback from IC critics and in accordance with the EU policies on intercultural and plurilingual education. This project is an original work and a first attempt at developing a much needed IC tool, which, for the first time, combines theories and practice from both IC education and plurilingual education. It will contribute to a better understanding of IC assessment in foreign language education, which is an area of concern and much debate, and it will also contribute to better understanding of factors affecting IC assessment and the washback effect of conducting such type of assessment, which are two understudied areas in intercultural research. The CLAIM-Tool project will be carried out by an experienced researcher in the field of intercultural education, and in cooperation and under supervision of an expert supervisor who has a strong background in multicultural and plurilingual education.

Keywords:E-LEARNING, INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE, INTERCULTURAL TRAINING, FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Disciplines:Intercultural communication, Language acquisition, Translation and interpretation sciences