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Imagine your students using a digital simulation in which they interact with avatars in several life-like scenarios, such as a service encounter or a peer-to-peer interaction. In each scenario, students will need to speak and act in culturally appropriate ways to successfully complete a task. Sometimes a complication occurs, which pushes students draw on their intercultural communicative skills to rectify the situation. At the end of the simulation, you receive a report on your students’ abilities to navigate these interactions.

Such a test, called the Intercultural Pragmatic Interactional Competence Assessment (IPIC), is currently under development at CASLS, in partnership with the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) at Georgetown University and the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). As AELRC Director Dr. Margaret Malone points out, “Assessing intercultural competence is challenging  both to conduct and to provide meaningful and succinct information to students. The IPIC will help language teachers reflect both on how to assess their students' intercultural competence as well as provide a structure for providing diagnostic feedback in ways students can continue to improve.”

Read more at: https://casls.uoregon.edu/classroom-resources/intercultural-simulation/

The U.S. Department of Education, under grant #P229A14004, supports development of this project. Contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education nor imply endorsement by the federal government.