Bridging Worlds: Harnessing the Potential of Interculturality in the Classroom 

Let’s Set the Stage for Our 2025-26 School-Year Virtual Professional Learning Series 

Written by Jay Ketner, PhD 
Co-Author, NCSSFL-ACTFL Intercultural Can-Do Statements 
Senior Manager, Wayside Publishing Professional Learning Team  

What Interculturality is and Why it Needs Our Attention 

Thinking back on my own journey learning French, I learned and practiced introducing myself to others, like every student does. It was the usual part and parcel of learning appropriate phrases for introducing myself, using informal you vs. formal you, and a smattering of responses I might say after someone introduced themselves to me. I knew what to say and some ways I might respond in different situations, but the evening when I arrived in France for a year-long stay with a host family, I learned I couldn’t do it right at first, and I couldn’t do it well, at least by French norms. 

When I first saw my French “parents,” I noticed neither of them were smiling ear to ear. I first shook hands with my French “dad” too long and gripped his hand more tightly than he did mine. I remained about an arm’s length away while he, on the other hand, moved in very close. My French “mom” moved in even closer kissing me once on each cheek. I knew about la bise but had never practiced it. I was clumsy. As for my new “sister,” I wasn’t sure if I should shake hands with her because she was several years younger, but I also wasn’t sure if we should exchange la bise—I didn’t really know whom I should be kissing. I think I remember us just saying hi. 

My lack of confidence the first time we all met wasn’t just because I was meeting new people with whom I’d be spending a lot of time; it was also because my French studies had been missing a critical piece that could have better prepared me for this authentic encounter: interculturality. 

 Interculturality refers to students investigating cultural products, practices and perspectives, and interacting with others using culturally appropriate language in culturally appropriate ways. This is different from a traditional approach to teaching culture, as it goes further to acknowledge the intrinsic communicative connection to culture—culture and language, and language and culture, are interrelated in complex ways. Culture was my learning about la bise; language was my learning the formal and informal phrases to use. Interculturality, in this instance, would have unified the communicative and cultural skills to interact appropriately in the actual moment of meeting my host family, and to know what I should expect and how to best interact in a way that would have been comfortable and natural for all of us. 

To teach for interculturality, the three Ps and communicative competence have to be woven together (I’ll provide some examples in a section below). In this way, interculturality bridges learning to the real world and real-life encounters, empowering learners to acquire, attain, and put it into practice in life. With the ever-expanding AI capabilities, text translators, speech recognition, speech creation, and the like, intercultural skills could eventually become the new primary mission of language education. So long as human beings share the earth, we’ll need to interact, connect, and ultimately work together to solve problems that traverse geopolitical lines of demarcation. This is just one reason interculturality is so important. 

Interculturality fosters a disposition to openness. It can be easy for one to dig in his/her heels with opinions and beliefs, and at times, it takes a conscientious act of allowing oneself to suspend opinions to truly hear someone who holds a much different perspective, informed by much different experiences. I think experiences are critical to interculturality—the familiar saying, “We are the sum of our experiences.” rings true. Few people’s opinions, positions, or beliefs are not shaped by what they have experienced (or feel they’ve experienced) in life. That reality should be acknowledged. The most successful international resolutions—and the leaders who carry them out—focus on the reality of two or more parties holding different perspectives, coming to the table with different cultural practices and norms, but listening and communicating from a place focused on finding a realistic solution. Rarely does each party get everything they want or hope for. Ideally, the outcome is a realistic solution that more or less benefits all.  

There’s a Framework for That: the NCSSFL-ACTFL Intercultural Can-Do Statements 

The NCSSFL-ACTFL Intercultural Can-Do Statements are a powerful tool for teachers and students for using communication in conjunction with interacting in authentic contexts. As a teacher, the Intercultural Can-Do Statements can facilitate both your planning and instruction. The intention of this article is to provide an overview of the Intercultural Can-Do Statements not just to get you started, but to give you some baseline knowledge as we start Grow to Glow—our school-year virtual series where we’ll bring you great interculturality-related content and offerings. If you’re eager for more complete information on the ICDSs, consult ACTFL’s information on using the Communicative and Intercultural Can-Do Statements.  

Through the Looking Glass: A Closer Look at the Structure of the Intercultural Can-Do Statements 

In my opinion, it’s the structure of the ICDSs that is one of their most impactful characteristics for teaching language and culture. They are organized by two components, or principles: investigate and interact. These two components should be seen as working together—using language to investigate the 3Ps and using cultural understanding of them to use authentic language in culturally appropriate ways. 

Investigate focuses instruction on how learners analyze and understand cultural products, practices, and perspectives (i.e. “learn” culture). 

1. Investigate — How learners explore and understand cultural products, practices, and perspectives. 
   Think: “What do I notice, and what do I learn about this culture?”
2. Interact — How learners engage appropriately with people from another culture. 
   Think: “How do I participate without accidentally being rude or misunderstood?”  

Each category has three proficiency bands that match language skill levels: 

• Novice – just starting out; can notice differences and try basic, safe interactions.
• Intermediate – can make comparisons and start adjusting their behavior based on cultural cues.
• Advanced – can adapt and navigate nuanced situations like a cultural insider. 

To establish common understanding, here’s what the Intercultural Can-Do Statements are: 

• Are intended to be used by learners to demonstrate what they can do at various proficiency sub-levels, from novice to advanced.
• Guide students in self-reflection and goal setting.
• Can be modified by teachers to be most appropriate for their local curriculum and context.
• Can be used for planning for instruction, identifying learning outcomes and goals, as the statements move from novice to advanced. 

Here’s what the Intercultural Can-Do Statements are not: 

• Not a checklist, or a “one and done” demonstration that indicates proficiency. Proficiency is developed over time in multiple instances and scenarios.
• Do not limit teachers to what can be introduced or taught to students—they are a guide. As stated above, they can be modified for individual and local contexts.
• Are not assessment instruments, as language acquisition happens over time and assessed with performance assessments (IPAs). 

The distinctions between what the Intercultural Can-Do Statements are and are not, are important to understand. Used with their proper intention, they are a powerful tool for teachers and students alike. Using them improperly sets up teachers and students to misunderstand and mischaracterize student performance at best, or to limit it at worst. 

How Can I Use it in My Classroom? 

With an understanding of what can-do statements are and aren’t, here are some ways to get started with using the Intercultural Can-Do Statements (or to refine your use if you’re currently using them with students). They provide a tool for the following that can help you save time and be more effective in teaching language and culture. Here are some key ways to get started, simplified:  

• Planning with a clear goal: 
  Instead of learning about “How to greet someone,” you can draw from the Can-do Statements to change the aim to “Students will be able to greet their friends’ parents politely in Spanish,” and “Students will be able to greet and welcome a student they don’t know to an extracurricular club.” You can see formal vs. informal language is included, proper gestures for greeting different generations of people, and different settings as to where introductions/greetings are taking place that create context. 
   
• Matching tasks and activities to proficiency sub-level: 
  The statements are organized from beginner → intermediate → advanced (and beyond), so you can see what’s realistic for your students now and what to aim for next. If at the novice-level students are greeting others appropriately in formal and informal contexts, at the intermediate-level students could greet others appropriately in formal and informal contexts but also ask and exchange information with the person they’re meeting. 
   
• Ensuring integration of culture and language: 
  Structured around the principles of investigate and interact, the ICDSs can serve as a guide or starting off point for seeing how you can take new or existing lesson plan content and present it in a more interwoven way, where language is connected to culture and vice-versa. 

Language without Culture, and Culture without Language, is an Empty Shell. 

Your classroom is a very special place. It can be easy to forget how special it is when you wake up in the morning, rush to get your own kids ready for school, maybe have a headache or didn’t sleep well the night before, and you walk into your classroom, flip on the lights, and think about getting the day over with. But you are stepping into a very special place, because all classrooms are spaces that with the right attention, thoughtfulness and care, can open students’ eyes and minds to things beyond their everyday. Yours is no different. 

But at the same time, yours is different. Language learning engages so many neurological processes in younger learners’ brains as they activate knowledge, stumble, and struggle to express themselves in the language they’re learning. They’re learning to communicate in ways that can connect them well beyond many of their families, friends, and communities and in so doing, expand, enrich, and nuance their lives in unexpected ways. The entire world lays waiting in your classroom each morning and only requires you to activate it. From art to history, climate to current events, global challenges to local traditions and more, all of that is there to draw your students in. 

For those of us who have learned other languages, we become keenly aware of how a particular language can reflect a particular culture—style of humor, idiomatic expressions, turns of phrase, and so on. Teaching language without deeply integrating culture (and vice-versa) is as sterile and unexciting as a petri dish on the counter of a lab. It’s formulaic, and algebraic. Consider looking out at a forest after all the leaves have fallen in autumn and seeing nothing but a sea of hazy brown; it can be a depressing sight. Where I live, we call it “stick season.” But no matter the time of year, if as a teacher, you use the Intercultural Can-Do Statements to guide your bridging of language and culture to create deep connections between the two, that same forest starts to bud out—a light shade of green starts to announce itself across the landscape, which eventually becomes a full-on symphony of different hues of green and includes all the flora and fauna that have either awakened or returned for the year. It has come alive. 

I hope you’ll join us this year for our Grow to Glow professional learning series. It’s our intention and hope that all of us, by coming together around learning and ideas, will be inspired to make classrooms come alive in splendid new ways. 

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