Local intercultural language assistants in New Zealand classrooms

ABSTRACT

Given the challenges faced in enacting curricular expectations of developing intercultural communicative competence through the teaching of languages, this study reports on a language and culture assistants (LACs) programme that may offer a viable pathway for foreign language programmes around the world. We examine how local non-native speaker LACs developed intercultural pedagogical skills when placed in schools. Data analysed was collected from interviews, written and oral reflections and teaching resources. The participants were 10 advanced Spanish students from two New Zealand universities who supported 12 teachers across 12 classes (approximately 350 students) in six schools over 7 weeks. Findings reveal that LACs of this profile – both a learner of the language and an interculturally competent speaker) – may become role models for school-aged children of a language. Pedagogically, we found that the LACs were expert informants who translated their intercultural experiences into teachable content.

KEYWORDS:

• Language assistants
• intercultural communicative competence
• language curricula
• Spanish as an additional language
• New Zealand
• non-native speakers

Introduction

The emergence of an intercultural approach to language teaching where learners combine language skills with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to interact with others who speak a different language (Byram, 1997, 2021) thus engaging in reflection and critical exploration of cultural diversity (Fantini, 2020) has shifted the place of culture in language teaching from the periphery to its core (East et al., 2022; Liddicoat, 2011). The goals of foreign language education have, consequently, expanded from the development of linguistic and communicative competence to the development of intercultural skills (Byram & Wagner, 2018).

The importance of the development of intercultural understanding and intercultural capabilities has resulted in their inclusion in national curricular documents including New Zealand’s, the context of the study reported here. In fact, the impetus for the current New Zealand curriculum released in 2007 is in many ways a response to the twenty-first-century imperative to develop competencies and skills underpinned by a set of principles that include a strong commitment to diversity in a country with bicultural heritage and a growing multicultural population (Ministry of Education, 2007). The connection between generic competencies such as ‘relating to others’ and the development of intercultural capabilities at school level gained relevance with arguments for the need of New Zealand’s twenty-first-century citizens needing to be educated for diversity (Bolstad et al., 2012). In 2014, the Ministry of Education released a report (Ministry of Education, 2014) sent to all schools that encouraged the development of international capabilities as a cross-curricular endeavour that would contribute to helping young New Zealanders to achieve success as intercultural citizens aware of other cultures and their own cultures. The document acknowledged the special place of the Learning Languages curriculum area, and the learning of an additional language more broadly as ‘one of the most effective ways for students to develop cross-cultural communicative competence and an awareness of other cultures and world-views’ (Ministry of Education, 2014, p. 12). The enactment of these expectations through the teaching of languages in schools has met a number of challenges described below. The Ministry of Education is currently leading a curriculum refresh of all learning areas (Te Poutahu, 2023), as well as a revision of the national assessment standards (Ministry of Education, 2023) so we are hoping that those challenges may be addressed in the resulting changes.

In New Zealand, the language of instruction in the majority of schools is English with some immersion schools using te reo Māori (the country’s indigenous language). For languages additional to the language of instruction, the curriculum introduced an entitlement – yet importantly not a mandate (East, 2012) – for schools to offer languages between Years 7 and 10 (students aged 11–14). Schools may offer programmes in a range of languages including te reo Māori, Pasifika languages (e.g. Samoan, Tongan), international languages (e.g. Chinese, French) and New Zealand Sign Language. Although many secondary schools (years 9–13) already had established languages programmes taught by qualified specialist teachers who are proficient in the target language and have been trained as language teachers, the 2007 curriculum brought about new pedagogical expectations with its focus on the development of intercultural language competence (East et al., 2022). For intermediate schools (Years 7 and 8), the change was more challenging as it required resourcing a completely new learning area with the necessary teachers and language teaching resources within the limited time available in their curriculum (see East, 2012; East et al., 2022) for more details of policy developments in the languages area in New Zealand. A key challenge of relevance for this article is the availability of teachers. Although some teachers in intermediate schools may have a genuine interest in languages teaching, they often lack target language proficiency or have not received any formal training in teaching an additional language (Scott & Butler, 2007). Although the New Zealand Ministry of Education funded for over a decade a national professional development programme to train teachers of languages (Erlam & Tolosa, 2022), there are still shortages of qualified teaching staff at intermediate level. One way to address the shortage of teachers is to utilise language assistants typically attached to transnational schemes such as those led by the ministries of education of countries like China, Spain, or Germany.

This article presents a different type of scheme in the form of a language and culture assistants (LACs) programme that was implemented across six schools in two main cities in New Zealand. The description of the programme, funded as part of an internationalisation strategy, provides context to the examination of the profile of the LACs and the resulting intercultural pedagogical skills they demonstrated in the programme. This paper contributes to studies on language assistant programmes by examining an innovative LAC scheme that placed local advanced Spanish university students in local schools, a scheme that may address some challenges in staffing foreign language programmes. To our knowledge, the use of local language assistants like those in this study has not been investigated. Our findings allow an exploration of the pedagogical possibilities and challenges of this scheme. Findings from the study will also provide additional insights into the development of intercultural competence in foreign language teaching by exploring the role and development of the LACs. Furthermore, the fact that the project was conducted at school level in an English-speaking country provides an illustration of the way other foreign languages are positioning themselves on wider internationalisation efforts (Chan et al., 2022).

Intercultural competence in the foreign language classroom

As seen in the introduction, a curricular focus on the development of intercultural communicative competence has become more prominent over the last decade in the New Zealand context. Similar trends have been documented elsewhere to the point that Byram et al. (2013) indicated that the appearance in curriculum documents of references to culture and intercultural competence suggests that the theorists have persuaded curriculum designers that these concepts are significant and worthy of attention. More widely, UNESCO (2013) outlined a vision for the development of intercultural competence within languages education that insisted that policy makers, materials developers and teacher educators, as well as administrators and schools, provide classroom practitioners with the knowledge, skills, experiences, resources and support they require. In language teaching practice, however, these ideals from academia and transnational organisations have yet to be realised (East et al, 2022). In fact, over the last decade, studies on the implementation of intercultural language teaching have shared the challenges that practitioners report in terms of poor understanding of a complex construct (Sercu et al., 2005), insufficient professional development (Díaz, 2013; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013), misalignment with assessment (Sinicrope et al., 2007), to name a few.

At a conceptual level, most scholars agree on the challenges in identifying exactly what the intercultural dimension entails (Dervin, 2020; Díaz, 2013). The proliferation of terms in this field can lead to confusion about exactly which label most adequately applies and which stances to pedagogy should be taken as teachers seek to enact and enhance the language–culture interface (East et al., 2022). Central to the construct, culture is viewed as a dynamic concept where language and culture are interdependent and where the focus is put on both the awareness of the inseparability of language and culture and the need to prepare learners to communicate across cultures (Piątkowska, 2015). Despite the widespread acknowledgement of the intercultural dimension of language teaching in policies and curricula, its place in the curriculum and how it should be taught is less clear (Michelson, 2018). The development of intercultural competence is limited by narrow and static conceptions of culture present in curricular materials and standards (Michelson, 2018). In pedagogical terms, moving from a static and often separated view of language and culture to a dynamic and integrated approach is likely to place significant demands on teachers for whom adopting an intercultural stance often ‘implies a radical rethinking of one’s goals for teaching a language’ (Crozet, 2017, p. 157).

Several studies have addressed the complexities of language teachers’ reported beliefs and actual practices in intercultural endeavours. For example, in a longitudinal study involving 40 primary schools in England, Driscoll et al. (2013) identified a mismatch between the clearly articulated importance of the intercultural dimension in teachers’ responses and their actual practices. In an interview study of 19 teachers in Germany, Brunsmeier (2017) concluded that although the teachers considered interculturality an important goal of foreign language learning, it is not consistently put into practice mainly because intercultural learning aims are not the focus of these teachers’ lessons. Drawing on data from a large international sample, Sercu et al. (2005) found that teachers were willing to teach intercultural competence, but this willingness was conditioned by their different beliefs about the best way to teach it. In New Zealand, a collaborative action-research study with teachers of languages in primary and intermediate schools identified the stages teachers go through while developing new understandings of intercultural language teaching (East et al., 2022). The majority of these studies have focused on the challenges for the teachers to reconcile competing demands coming from top-down curricular reforms. Other studies on intercultural education have documented the complexities of addressing interculturality for different stakeholders and at different levels including language policy (Akker et al., 2008), language teacher education (Byram & Wagner, 2018) and assessment (Borghetti, 2017). In short, as concluded by Byram (2014) in an article reviewing the state of the field in a 25-year period, the increasing importance of an intercultural dimension has not resulted in the widespread implementation initially envisioned. There are still challenges in ensuring that advances in theory reach the world of practice as well as limited inclusion of an intercultural dimension more prominently in teacher education programmes and language teaching materials.

LACs in the foreign language classroom

We define a language assistant as a teaching assistant who helps the classroom teacher with a variety of tasks linked to teaching languages. The typical language assistants are young native speakers of the language with a range of educational credentials and teaching experience who travel to a different country to teach their first language to students learning it in a foreign language context. School communities view the presence of language teaching assistants as enriching classrooms linguistically and culturally (Carless, 2006; Codó & McDaid, 2019). Evaluative studies have found that the assistants enrich learners’ knowledge of foreign languages and cultures by exposing them to authentic learning materials and sharing information about their home countries (Hasegawa, 2011). Challenges that arise in the implementation of the language assistant schemes range from the experience of living in a foreign country (Wörsching, 2012), and the challenges in communication of expectations, to the development of the assistants’ professional identity (Buckingham, 2018). Dafouz and Hibler (2013) used a team-teaching typology to classify the functions ascribed to the language assistants in different programmes and concluded that, in most schemes, the assistants assume a supportive role working alongside the teachers to prepare and deliver additional activities and ‘act as language informants’ (p. 657).

Common to all schemes, the main function assigned to language assistants is their support for the classroom teacher on linguistic aspects such as the development of the learners’ oral language skills including pronunciation (Carless, 2006). In their review of a language assistant programme in the United Kingdom, Martin and Mitchell (1993) found that consistent use of the target language by the assistants created opportunities for the school pupils to see for themselves that ‘speaking another language is a natural way of communicating’ (p. 32) thus increasing their motivation to learn the foreign language. The insistence on the language assistants’ role modelling pronunciation and providing opportunities for authentic conversations in the target language seems to be based on the perceived notion of ‘superiority’ of native speakers (Medgyes, 1992) as socio-cultural and linguistic models for language learners (Davies, 2013; Moussu & Llurda, 2008). The opposite notion questioned the ability to teach languages of the non-native speakers viewed through the lens of deficit and ‘othering’ (Holliday, 2005). Although the notion of the native speaker suggesting uniformity among speakers of a language has been widely contested and challenged in policy and language planning (May, 2014; Waddington, 2022), as well as in tensions in classroom delivery models (Dafouz & Hibler, 2013), it still seems dominant in the way language assistant schemes are marketed and perceived (Codó & McDaid, 2019). Employing bilingual language assistants might provide alternative and more balanced perspectives on the role of the assistants as examples of learners who employ their existing cultural and linguistic experience in different contexts. For example, Macaro et al. (2014) found that classes with bilingual assistants had greater academic improvements over a period of three months, partially due to the assistants being able to scaffold learning more effectively. The authors concluded that bilingual assistants ‘are perhaps uniquely placed to go beyond explanations of educational concepts by making conceptual links with the learner’s own culture – which monolingual teachers are rarely able to do’ (p. 43).

Besides supporting the development of language skills, the other role traditionally assigned to language assistants is to bring the culture of the native-speaking country into the classroom, as they are seen as ‘personal embodiment of the ‘cultural dimension’’ (Martin & Mitchell, 1993, p. 32), a definition that positions the assistants as monolithic cultural ambassadors (Codó & McDaid, 2019). As seen above, these static and narrow views of language and culture have been critiqued and contested. An intercultural perspective has brought about a wider view of what it means to be a speaker of a language and know about the culture/s where it is spoken consistent with changes in the goals of foreign language learning. As Byram and Risager (1999) argued, there is a need to differentiate between the cultural competence of the ‘native’ speaker, who identifies with one language, and the ‘intercultural’ speaker who is able to ‘see the relationships between the learner’s and the native-speaker’s languages and cultures’ (p. 2), giving way to a more realistic and desirable notion of the interculturally competent speaker able to mediate between several languages and cultures (Byram, 2012) and avoiding the risk of homogenisation of the native and the target cultures (Doerr, 2013).

The literature on language assistants has identified similar challenges to those faced by teachers on the implementation of an intercultural perspective in language teaching. For instance, Sercu et al. (2005) identified the assistants’ tendencies to teach cultural topics within superficial and static views of culture (Omaggio Hadley, 2001) such as tourist attractions, folklore and festivals rather than topics which could engage students in interactive discussions highlighting the differences and similarities across cultures. Along the same lines, Buckingham (2018) found that language assistants struggled with introducing critical views of the target language and culture because of fear of promoting stereotypes or their own lack of understanding of the target culture. More broadly, Ehrenreich (2006) found that language assistant schemes tend to perpetuate stereotypes in the views of the target culture. The study reported here provides an alternative profile of language assistants who are local advanced speakers of the target language who embody the interculturally competent speaker (Byram, 2012; Byram & Risager, 1999) providing a more realistic model for language learners.

As seen in this brief review, enacting curricular expectations of developing intercultural communicative competence through the teaching of languages faces a number of challenges. Our study aims to address gaps in understanding the development of intercultural pedagogical skills of a particular profile of language assistants who, as interculturally competent speakers, may offer a viable pathway for foreign language programmes around the world.

Design of the study

The research presented here is part of a larger study that investigated the potential of a LACs programme to support the teaching of Spanish culture and language in New Zealand schools. The LACs programme is one of a number of initiatives funded by the Latin American Centre for Asia-Pacific Excellence (CAPE), one of three centres funded by the New Zealand government to enhance the country’s engagement with Asia and Latin America. According to the description in their website the CAPEs ‘harness evidence-based research, stakeholder experience, academic expertise, and industry acumen to deliver practical education and knowledge, resources, and support to New Zealanders’ (CAPE, n.d.). The LACs initiative reported here contributed to the CAPE’s global competence goals to foster intercultural and linguistic expertise in New Zealand. The Latin America CAPE approached two universities to develop the programme presented here. The three authors, who are academics in those universities with expertise in language and education, designed and oversaw the programme.

The focus of the data presented here is on the examination of how the profile of the LACs resulted in particular intercultural and pedagogical characteristics. The first iteration of the programme was conducted in only one city and did not include a research focus. The second iteration of the programme presented in this paper expanded to two cities and placed 10 advanced Spanish students from two universities as LACs supporting 12 teachers across 12 classes (approximately 350 students) in six schools for 1 h a week for 7 weeks. The participant schools were identified by the researchers through their professional networks. These were schools that either had established, yet under-resourced, Spanish teaching programmes or were interested in offering some Spanish learning to their pupils, therefore fulfilling the curriculum expectation of offering a language. A second criterion was the proximity of the school to the universities, yet that proved difficult in one of the cities.

The volunteer LACs responded to announcements, posted by lecturers of advanced Spanish courses in the two universities, about the CAPE programme. In total, 25 applications were received, but some of the initial applicants did not meet the criteria set by the project of level of language or academic background (advanced Spanish majors) or were unavailable because of conflict of the timing of the project with their university commitments. In the end, 10 LACs were identified and contracted with payment for 48 h over a period of 10 weeks. The hours paid covered planning, workshops, meetings and the LACs time in the schools with further assistance with transport costs.

There were seven female and three male LACs. Eight of the LACs were New Zealand born and spoke English as their first language while two had migrated to New Zealand with their families before starting university and spoke English and Spanish as additional languages. At the time of recruitment, all the LACs were taking advanced courses in Spanish as part of double-major degrees in a range of subjects which gave a true interdisciplinary nature to the discussions and approach to teaching. All the LACs, except for two, had travelled to a Spanish-speaking country for at least 3 months. In other words, unlike most of the existing language assistant programmes, these LACs were not native speakers of the target language they were going to teach. Table 1 presents other relevant information about the LACs, including their assigned pseudonym as agreed following ethics protocols.

Table 1. Language and Culture Assistants (LACs).

Pseudonym	Studying	Teaching
Amelia	Law and Spanish	Year 8
Anna	Chemistry and Spanish	Year 8
Claire	Sociology and Spanish	Year 8
Daniel	Computer science and Spanish	Years 7 & 8
Harry	International relations and Spanish	Years 8 & 9
Lawrence	History and Spanish	Year 9
Lucy	Political science and Spanish	Years 8 & 9
Melanie	Geography and Spanish	Year 7
Samantha	Intercultural communication and applied translation	Years 7 & 8
Stella	Communications and Spanish	Year 10

The LACs were assigned to work with a teacher to prepare Spanish lessons and create resources for the participating classes of students in Years 7–10 (ages 11–14). Before going to the schools, the LACs participated in introductory workshops facilitated by one of the researchers (a language education expert) to prepare them to use their advanced Spanish language skills and their knowledge and experiences of Spanish-speaking cultures in their lessons. The workshops included key information about the New Zealand curriculum for languages with a focus on intercultural language teaching. Given their lack of pedagogical background to teach languages, the LACs received ongoing support from the school teachers and from the researchers (with expertise in language and education), including regular meetings to discuss lesson plans and share reflections which they were asked to write as they planned their lessons.

Data used for research purposes include interviews, reflections from the LACs (individually written in their lesson plans and in collective debriefing sessions), and resources developed by the LACs. The researchers conducted semistructured interviews with the participating LACs, the teachers and small groups of pupils from each of the classrooms. The semistructured interviews had 12 guiding questions drawn from previous literature on language assistants and the interests of the project in order to identify perceived gains in language learning and in the development of intercultural communicative competence as well as highlights and challenges of the programme. The study had ethical clearance from the two universities and all participants signed consent forms.¹ The data gathered were analysed following the principles of qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The interviews were transcribed and initially coded according to the question categories. For example, answers to a question where the LACs described their role in the project were coded in terms of their identities and the tasks they performed. The codes generated from the interviews were then compared with the emerging themes from the collective reflections where the LACs had shared the highlights of their experience. Two members of the research team analysed the data from each city separately and then met for a day to discuss coding and agree on the resulting themes. From a pedagogical angle, the written reflections from the weekly lesson plans were analysed alongside the resources developed by the LACs to examine the enactment of intercultural language teaching that had been presented in the workshops.

Findings

Findings are presented in two sections. In the first section, we examine the profile of the LACs as language learners and intercultural beings. In the second section, we examine the experience of the LACs as teachers of Spanish, highlighting those aspects that were unique to the intercultural and pedagogical skills considered crucial to understanding the viability of a LAC scheme to support the teaching of foreign languages in schools.

Profile of the LACs

LACs as language learners

The profile of the assistants sought and placed in the school classrooms for the programme reported here had a key difference with other language assistant programmes worldwide. Unlike native speakers who travel overseas to become language assistants, the LACs recruited in this programme were local university students in advanced Spanish language courses who taught in local schools. Therefore, they personified a successful Spanish language learner who had been through a similar path to the school students they were teaching. Anna, one of the LACs, commented that she was ‘coming to the realisation that I was teaching this thing that only a few years ago I was learning quite intensely’. As expressed by one of the classroom teachers, the LACs were seen as ‘someone who the pupils could identify with in terms of the process of learning the language’. This perception was echoed by some of the LACs who defined the programme, saying: ‘it was about bringing our experiences to those students as language learners as well as people who've been through a similar course of high school education’. Claire commented on how the LACs modelled the language-learning journey: ‘I tried to transmit to them not being scared about the fact that we're clearly not all fluent in Spanish, we're all learning’. Lawrence saw himself as a model of a learner of Spanish: ‘I don't consider myself fluent. But they noticed that this guy got the level. They realised that this person can be an expert without being perfect’.

The teachers also viewed positively the LACs’ profile in terms of age and experience as Spanish language learners. One of them commented that the LACs ‘were closer in age to our students’. She added that the LACs ‘brought a “different face” to learning Spanish’ comparing the assistants to their regular teachers of Spanish. Another teacher commented on the LACs’ similarities to their students: ‘since they have learned Spanish as an additional language, they related to our students’ learning journey’. These comments point at one of the programme’s goals, namely, to promote learning of Spanish across age levels and provide motivation to the school students to see an educational pathway with the language they are learning.

LACs as intercultural beings

The profile of the LACs was also important in terms of the intercultural nature of the programme. We established several layers of interculturality. Firstly, each of the LACs brought their own cultural histories with different family backgrounds and heritage. Secondly, as students of Spanish, they had studied the culture/s where it is spoken, often through literature, history and film, as is commonly done at university level. Thirdly, most of them had had direct experience living in a Spanish-speaking country and drew on those experiences extensively during the programme. Finally, the LACs often had to research the culture/s of Latin America (the focus of the project) to ensure they were fully prepared for teaching. We will next examine the last three intercultural layers in more detail.

When asked about how they managed the intercultural content, most of the LACs drew on their own experiences visiting or living in Latin America. Amelia felt she could bring her own perspective, particularly to ‘the classes on Latin American countries that I’ve visited I felt like it wasn’t just stereotypes’. She went further to reflect: ‘the kids understand it more if you yourself understand it, then you’re more confident in expressing it to them as well’. Stella relied on her own experiences going to high school in Argentina: ‘Being able to draw on stories to explain different things and be able to compare between New Zealand and Argentina was really, really helpful’. The school students liked that the LACs provided ‘good insights into the culture because they’ve been there’ and shared ‘lots of anecdotes and stories of their time in Latin America’. Often the LACs tried to find common points with New Zealand’s own history: ‘tons of comparable situations in Latin America and New Zealand in terms of colonisation and presence of indigenous cultures’. Stella also made efforts to ‘connect with Māori culture and the fact that a point in common is the colonial past so I had to research to ensure the comparisons were accurate. At times I felt quite inadequate talking about my own country’s history’.

In one of the group’s debriefings, these insights turned into a deeper collective reflection on the type of intercultural content that was relevant and appropriate in the school classroom. In particular, the LACs discussed the difference between the knowledge they had acquired in their university studies and what they could or should share with the students in the schools. Some of their comments indicated the dilemma:

I couldn’t use the knowledge I had about Latin America from my courses as I did not consider it age-appropriate.

Some of the serious social and political issues were not the most appropriate for these school kids.

I had to think of ways of dealing with the darker parts of history and make these palatable to the students.

The challenge posed by the type of content to include in the lessons turned into an opportunity for some of the LACs: ‘I had to research and ensure these [topics] were appropriate’. ‘It was nice to have the opportunity to research and go into issues from a different and wider perspective’. Researching as preparation to their lessons allowed a deeper exploration of issues which added another layer of interculturality. Lucy commented how her experiences living in Chile had helped her in ‘knowing where to start and how to find points of contact’. Two of the LACs who had not been to Latin America were resourceful and ‘reached out to Latin Americans to have their take on issues’. Harry reflected ‘I was in awe of how diverse Latin America really is. My knowledge was hugely expanded thanks to my conversations with these people I knew’. Daniel thought that his conversations with Latin Americans made him realise ‘how different each person’s experience is depending on social class’. What is evident in these comments is that this project motivated the LACs to reflect on the complexities of culture and their own knowledge and engagement with the culture/s they were teaching about during the project. These complexities were embedded in the larger context of their role as assistants in a language and cultures programme, as we will examine in the next section.

LACs as teachers

Teaching and culture

Turning their knowledge of Latin American culture/s into teachable content became a pedagogical issue as the LACs decided what to teach and how to teach it. Claire described her process: ‘making sure that you're sharing the right information in a way that’s accessible’. Similarly, Amelia considered that ‘there are definitely aspects of Latin America that … you know, the politics and the history and you don't want to explain in your 45-minute lesson’. Stella decided to introduce a tool for analysing culture which she had learned when she was an exchange student: ‘It's called the iceberg model, where 90% of culture is below the surface and the little bit at the top is what you see’. She described how the iceberg was used: ‘every time we kind of talked about a new location or a culture, or something, we would talk about why they did things. We went from the surface and tried to think why, why. And I think it got them thinking’.

After the preparatory workshops, the pedagogical and practical decisions regarding the inclusion of culture were discussed separately in each of the sites of the programme. In one of the sites, the LACs followed the lead of the schools they were supporting in terms of the content they taught, thus teaching Spanish in the context of arts and literature in one school, history in another school and an interdisciplinary unit on buildings and technology in the third school. In the other site, the LACs decided to give coherence to their sessions using the theme of ‘a trip through Latin America’ where the classes would ‘visit’ a different country every week. The students were issued a passport that was stamped by the LAC at the end of each lesson as a way of recording what they had learned. In order to take advantage of the knowledge about Latin America in the group, and to share the workload of preparing and planning the lessons, each LAC chose a country they knew well and developed a lesson plan around a cultural aspect and its related language. The resulting lesson and its resources were uploaded to a shared Google Drive and discussed in the weekly meeting. In order to steer away from what could be construed as just a ‘tourist approach’ to teaching culture, the LACs were encouraged by the project team to include comparative and reflective elements embedded in each lesson to open the space to an intercultural lens as seen in the illustrative lesson plan in Table 2.

Table 2. Lesson plan.

Topic: Visiting Peru – Uses of wool
Learning Outcomes: Students will review colours and learn how to express birthdays. Students will be able to identify uses of wool in the Indigenous population of Peru, including for clothing and for communication in the ancient times of the Inca empire.
Lesson Overview Introduce Peru – map and PowerPoint Review colours by describing colourful clothing of the Indigenous populations of Peru – pictures Compare the uses of wool by the Indigenous populations of Peru with the wool industry in New Zealand – discussion, newspaper articles, videos Learn about the Inca empire and how they used a craft called quipu to communicate about numbers – videos Create a Quipu to communicate their birthdays – wool yarns Communicative task – each student picks up a quipu, identifies the birth date, goes around the room asking their classmates their birthday until they match the quipu with the peer. Reflect on different systems of communication used in different cultures (compare the Inca quipu with Māori carving).

Planning for teaching

The collaborative process of planning and developing resources was appreciated by the LACs who had had a brief induction and preparation for the programme and had limited time for planning their sessions in schools while studying full time at university. Besides being a time saver, sharing their knowledge of different cultural aspects in Latin America deepened the LACs’ own intercultural knowledge. Lawrence commented: ‘I appreciated the collaboration and getting to know from different people who have been to the actual country. They have that expertise, share it and make it richer’. Melanie concurred: ‘It was really collaborative. It was really good hearing what the others had experienced’. Despite the benefits of having one person taking the lead in a topic, each LAC tailored the generic lesson plan to their own context and students.

From collective plans to individual teaching

The LACs tried to balance linguistic, communicative and intercultural aspects in their lessons while engaging the students. The LACs seemed aware of their role as ambassadors in introducing the culture/s where Spanish is spoken and the responsibility of presenting these to the school pupils. The enactment of this responsibility was realised differently by each of them ranging from analyses of stereotypes to being factually accurate. Lawrence, for instance, insisted in ‘deconstructing common perceptions. They [the students] really hadn't heard much about some of the stereotypes I talked about’. Lucy was pleasantly surprised that the students ‘had really insightful comments about even slavery and colonisation. They were trying to teach me about what they had learned in other classes and connecting and comparing’. Amelia also ensured she was providing points of comparison: ‘So I contrasted a lot. We did certain festivities and we compared, for example, Christmas in Colombia to Christmas in New Zealand’. She described how she included different facets of life in the countries she was introducing: ‘show them how Indigenous people live in certain parts of the Amazon, for example’. She reflected:

I hope I was able to highlight aspects that contrasted but also showed them how similar we can be, like ‘oh look, children your age also enjoy playing football and rugby.’ Yeah, there's a lot that you can relate to as well.

The classroom teachers concurred that a highlight of the programme had been the opportunity for their students to learn about other cultures through the eyes of the LACs: ‘they loved the anecdotes about the cultural aspects’. As summed up by another teacher, the contribution of the LACs was, for their students, ‘an “eye opener” about life in Latin America’ as it is a region that they may be unfamiliar for the school pupils at that age.

Reflecting on the experience of being a LAC

Overall, the experience of being a LAC was considered successful by all the participants. Since the LACs had volunteered to participate in the programme, they shared an open disposition towards becoming assistants. They concluded that it had been a positive and rewarding experience despite some challenges such as timetabling, the tight timeframe for preparation and the distance they had to travel to the schools (in one of the sites). One of the LACs’ main motivations to participate in the project was to share their love for the Spanish language and the cultures of Latin America. As Stella put it: ‘get the students more interested in both like the current culture and context, but also get them more understanding about why learn Spanish’. Amelia concurred: ‘especially in a school like School S where they don't have a Spanish language programme. I think it's really good to get the students thinking about learning Spanish’.

Another motivation to become a LAC through the CAPE project was an interest in acquiring language-teaching experience. Five of the 10 LACs concluded that after the experience in the programme they would consider going into teaching in the future. Three of them are currently pursuing teaching degrees. At a personal level, the 10 LACs agreed that participating in this project helped them gain a deeper appreciation of Spanish as a skill and Latin America as a complex region. As Samantha concluded: ‘[the programme] has helped me see Latin America in a different light’. They felt they learned a great deal about the Spanish-speaking language and the cultures they took with them into the classroom, noting that they ‘learned a lot more’ than they had expected. All LACs noted an enhanced confidence in their own Spanish skills and intercultural awareness. As one LAC put it, ‘teaching the culture of other cultures’, was a deeply meaningful and educational experience.

This meaningful educational experience was contextualised more widely in some of the LACs’ final reflections where they saw that programmes like the one described here could contribute to growing knowledge and awareness about other cultures in the school pupils.

I think a lot of them [students] weren't really aware of Latin America. I hope it opened up their minds to all the new things and the possibilities of Latin America. Because I feel like in New Zealand, we think of it as like one big blob. (Amelia)

I feel that New Zealand is very monocultural. So showing that there’s more and broadening their horizons will really help in the long run. Not even just Spanish or Latin America, but also to understand diversity because of globalisation. (Stella)

Realising there’s more than New Zealand. There are other Indigenous populations out there. Being more curious about seeing what others do. (Harry)

Because they’re in an increasingly globalised world and they’re smart kids. It broadens their awareness of what they can do in the world. (Claire)

Discussion

The findings presented in the previous section offered a number of insights into an innovative LAC programme that has the potential to address challenges in resourcing and staffing the teaching of languages in New Zealand schools and – arguably – elsewhere. More widely, the profile of the assistants that participated in this programme may advance our understanding of the complexities of enacting intercultural education.

Some of the evidence from the reflections and interviews with the LACs share commonalities with the literature on language assistants in different parts of the world. Similar to duties assigned to assistants in other languages, the LACs worked alongside the teachers in a mutually supportive role (Dafouz & Hibler, 2013). As was the case in Buckingham (2018) and Carless (2006), the LACs in the present study faced pedagogical challenges such as planning. The teachers agreed that the LACs became important role models for their students (Martin & Mitchell, 1993) by embodying the possibilities of learning a language to a level of mastery that allows them to teach it.

The fact that the profile of LACs recruited to this programme was different to language assistants studied elsewhere brings about major divergences from other schemes. Given that the LACs were learners of Spanish, the perceived superiority of native speakers (Medgyes, 1992) as linguistic models for school students was shifted in this programme. The LACs were employing their own language and intercultural resources and experiences to teach a language which was still developing from them. Some of the findings provided evidence that these LACs, as interculturally competent speakers (Byram, 2012) might provide a more realistic model for language learners.

By placing LACs who were local non-native speakers of Spanish, the students could see older versions of themselves as role models of potential aspirations and realistic opportunities offered by learning a language. The LACs who participated here were aware that their Spanish was not perfect, yet they did not see that as an impediment to teaching it to the school learners. These LACs seemed more interested in engaging the learners in ways that they considered motivating and useful. The teachers also concurred that the LACs offered a genuine and more realistic representation of the potential for their students to become future bilinguals. The fact that the LACs shared similar backgrounds with the students placed them in a position to better understand what the students were going through in their language-learning journeys (Macaro et al., 2014). In a way, in terms of language learning role models, this group of LACs represented an academic ‘success story’ for the school-aged students who might see that learning a language is a reachable goal that may open other doors in their lives.

Perhaps the most interesting insights brought about by the profile of the LACs in this study were the layers of interculturality gleaned from the data. As advanced learners of Spanish, the LACs were well into their own intercultural journey. However, participation in this study deepened these journeys as they faced the complexities of teaching culture and becoming brokers of knowledge of the language and the culture/s associated with it. Although, on the surface, the practical decisions made in their lessons seemed to align with ‘tourist’ approaches to teaching culture (Omaggio Hadley, 2001), the LACs demonstrated that they were able to develop teaching content and resources that supported an intercultural dimension (Dervin, 2020). This heightened awareness of the intricacies of dealing with cultural content detailed in the Findings section indicate that LACs like those who participated in this programme can potentially introduce a unique intercultural lens when teaching because as intercultural speakers they were able to mediate between several languages and cultures. To begin, they knew that their own knowledge and experiences with the Latin American culture/s needed to be carefully presented for the school-aged children. In these reflections, it was evident that the LACs were not thinking of content like festivities or food at a surface level. They were going beyond the surface to support the school children’s understanding of cultural manifestations and celebrations, including potentially problematic explorations of the colonial past in Latin America and New Zealand, for example. The fact that these LACs could relate these realities to those in New Zealand is something that a typical (foreign) language assistant might not be able to do so readily.

Some of the LACs mentioned wanting to deconstruct stereotypes as something important in their teaching, a common concern when teaching culture documented elsewhere (Sercu et al., 2005; Tolosa et al., 2018). Given that the study did not collect evidence from classroom observations, these intentions included in the LACs reflections may not be corroborated. However, both teachers and students’ interviews indicated a positive perception of the way the cultural content had been handled by the LACs. In fact, when asked openly about what they learned, the students mentioned everyday anecdotes frequently, indicating that the LACs had avoided generic knowledge and shared their lived experience that provided more authenticity to the cultural content.

The LACs faced the challenge of turning their knowledge of Latin American culture into teachable knowledge, or pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986). As seen in the reflections shared in the Findings, the LACs were aware that the school pupils did not have the level of maturity or background knowledge to deal with content that they had learned at university. However, they found ways of discussing shared colonial histories through the examination of present-day Indigenous populations in New Zealand and Latin America, for example. A further layer of interculturality was present in the co-construction of knowledge facilitated by the LACs’ shared planning sessions. The fact that they could lead the content of one session with a country where they had first-hand knowledge allowed them to more confidently translate their personal experience on that country into teachable content. The final interviews allowed the LACs space for reflecting on how they emerged from this experience with enhanced learning similar to what has been observed in study abroad programmes (Doerr, 2015).

Conclusion

The study presented here set out to examine the profile of a group of LACs and the resulting intercultural and pedagogical skills they demonstrated in the programme. An obvious limitation to the generalisability of our conclusions is the small scale and of this initiative. However, we argue that our examination of the LACs’ experience provides insights into how a programme like this may be a pathway to teach language and culture in current curriculum aspirations around the world. In countries, like New Zealand, preparing and employing local language assistants may address some of the shortages of qualified teachers of languages in some sectors. Interestingly, schemes like the one presented here were only possible because of funding that was part of a wider internationalisation agenda rather than a local response to a local challenge.

Given the challenges faced in enacting the curriculum expectation of developing intercultural competence through the teaching of languages, the language assistants with a profile like the one described in this paper may be an untapped resource. By avoiding a monolithic view of language and culture and employing local interculturally competent speakers, the LAC programme motivated school children to see what is possible when learning a language. Equally important, the LACs’ own intercultural competencies were furthered as they translated their own experiences into teaching content. The examination of the layers of interculturality evident in the LACs reflections and lessons will merit further research. Pedagogically, the data presented here provided emerging evidence of how these LACs were able to move from teaching ‘knowledge about’ cultures to developing skills and attitudes to ‘know how to’ develop intercultural competence (Byram & Wagner, 2018). In the process, the LACs seem to have emerged from the project ‘capitalising on their reflective practices’ (Doerr, 2015, p. 380) to critically engage with language and culture in their future, an unanticipated outcome of the project.

The programme was not without challenges of a different nature including timetabling, funding and availability of pedagogical support. The evidence examined here offers possible pathways for supporting teaching and learning languages in growing multilingual and multicultural contexts. Future research can continue to probe the viability of schemes like the one described here.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the support of the Latin American Centre for Asia-Pacific Excellence (CAPE) that provided funding for the programme described here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ethics approval was granted on 24 August 2020 by the Victoria University of Wellington Human Ethics Committee with approval number 27790, and it was ratified by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee.