Diseño de una intervención pedagógica hibrida en la promoción de un aprendizaje lingüístico e intercultural

Constant waves of immigration, technological advances, globalization, and health crises have caused profound transformations in the way citizens live and interact. Educators and learners are called to assume an open mind and empathetic attitude towards increasingly intercultural communities (Clouet, 2012; Busse & Krause, 2016). The classroom is a safe environment to educate language learners in developing effective communicative practices with others interculturally different. In this regard, educational research and innovation should serve as a platform to instruct learners in more integral, holistic, and humanistic ways (Byram et al., 2002; Cubero, 2023). In the context of language teaching and learning, educators have the opportunity to merge linguistic and intercultural objectives to better prepare them for the uncertain future that awaits in which they will certainly interact, meet, or collaborate with interculturally different people (López-Rocha, 2016).

To do so, practices in language teaching should progressively shift from a monolinguistic objective (preparing learners to speak a foreign language) to intercultural language objectives (preparing learners to speak the foreign language from an intercultural perspective (Cubero, 2023).

Many scholars and foreign language educators support the need to instruct and facilitate a language instruction infused with intercultural knowledge and content to familiarize students with new cultural views and perspectives aiming at building bridges of socialization and communication while promoting tolerance, understanding and respect (Byram, 2020; Houghton, 2013; Porto et al., 2018).

In the English foreign language classroom, educators have experimented and promoted an intercultural language praxis to better train students for intercultural communication (González & Borham, 2012; Rodríguez, & Gerke, 2022; Lin & Wang, 2018). 

A plausible way to achieve these objectives is through pedagogical interventions. The concept of an intervention is connected to intersection, support, cooperation, guidance, understanding, and clarification framed in a context of learning opportunities to fix or improve an issue (Rodríguez,1988; Bisquerra, 2003). It is a reliable scientific tool that can be used to measure the level of effectiveness of intended interculturally infused teaching. Results from such practice can support the development of new theoretical insights that contribute to the body of literature and praxis in the field of language learning and teaching. Designing a learning experience with the objective of developing intercultural communicative competence (ICC) requires thoughtful, conscious, structured, and well-planned instruction. It is an undeniable reality that the nature of teaching is associated with many factors and elements interrelated to the teacher’s praxis (e.g., planning, designing, creating, monitoring, observing, assessing, decision-making), the learning context, educational policies, and the curriculum (Cubero-Vásquez, 2022).

In this sense, finding room to teach intercultural elements in a language class should begin with a willing and active educator (Savu, 2014; Cubero-Vasquez, 2021).

To help educators find potential routes to capitalize from intercultural instruction, this paper proposes a model to implement an intercultural pedagogical intervention.

The fusion between language and culture is not easy. In practice, many questions and challenges emerge, and the literature in this regard is scarce. Intercultural teaching requires research, the use of active methodologies and the consideration of various principles to maximize the quality of the learning opportunities students are exposed to (Byram, 2020; Auger, 2023; Cubero,2023; Casoli-Uvsløkk & Brevik, 2023).

 It is critical that language educators participate in a reflective, analytic, and constructive process centering new teaching strategies and methods to contribute to educational innovation. In the urge to quickly adapt to the progressive changes in educational contexts, teachers are called to break the cycle of traditional teaching in the language classroom. In this respect, a combination of methods can be used to outline a hybrid pedagogical intervention to successfully approach the challenge of mediating intercultural communicative competence. For instance, CLIL and PBL are identified as influential approaches used in the language classroom with positive learning outcomes. (Yufrizal, 2021; Sánchez-García & Pavón-Vázquez, 2021; Cubero, 2021).

Merging and considering principles from each of these methods can be used to support the design of a hybrid educational model to guide and facilitate an intercultural teaching (Cubero, 2021). According to Coyle et al. (2010), implementing theoretical ideas to change traditional practices requires time, patience, and professional support. In this sense, implementing or experimenting with a hybrid methodology of teaching principles from CLIL and PBL suggests a careful planning and design of tasks to promote language students’ progression not only in language skills but in the critical component of intercultural learning in the context of foreign/second language learning. Adding to the formula elements from critical pedagogy allows the teacher and the learner to understand and take advantage of the instrumental use of the target language when using it to seek an active, participatory, dialogic, autonomous, and constructive learning experience for both the educator and the students.

This paper proposes a model to facilitate a pedagogical intervention in the foreign/second language classroom to develop learners’ ICC while meeting linguistic objectives to effectively equip learners with tools, knowledge, and strategies needed for students to communicate, collaborate, and interrelate in intercultural contexts in more efficient ways. This qualitative research addresses questions in order to reflect about how language educators can design a pedagogical intervention towards the development of ICC in language learners and what steps and teaching procedures are required to design a model to mediate the intercultural component in the foreign language class?

This literature review scrutinized academic and scientific articles addressing how to instruct language learners in the development of ICC in the classroom. A qualitative document review is a useful approach to theorizing about issues (Morgan, 2022). This scoping review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) (Barquero, 2022). Scientific articles, chapters, books, and peer-reviewed articles about foreign/second language teaching and intercultural communicative competence in educational settings were reviewed to document the possible steps a language educator interested in teaching the intercultural component in the language classroom should follow and consider. The databases consulted were ScienceDirect, Latindex, Google Scholar, Taylor and Francis, Sage, DOAJ, Dialnet, Eric, Oxford academic and Scopus. Books, original, empirical, research, and review articles were considered in the analysis about intercultural teaching were included and analyzed to support the proposal. These academic search engines allowed locating related articles that were coherent with the key words in Spanish and English established to carry out the process. The data search employed keywords such as “intercultural communicative competence,” “intercultural competence teaching,” and “CLIL and PBL language approaches and methodologies.” Articles that were duplicated and were not approaching language didactics and teaching in relation to the intercultural component in the foreign/second language class were excluded from the analysis since they were not contributing to support the intercultural model design. Besides, case studies, research not involving students from educational settings, or papers about instruments validation were also excluded from the analysis.  The detailed screening process is listed in Table 1.

Table 1

Screening process

Identification	Combined databases search results (ScienceDirect, Latindex, Google Scholar, Taylor and Francis, Sage, DOAJ, Dialnet, Eric, Oxford academic and Scopus).
	Records identified through the different database searching. Domain: Title/Abstract/Keywords Approach: Thematic N= 781
Screening	Domain: Article Title. Approach: Duplication, gray literature, and editorial letters.	Excluded N= 486
Eligibility	Domain: abstract reading. Approach: metadata.	Excluded N= 119
	Domain: abstract and content skim reading. Approach: excluded articles that do not address educational settings in the field of EFL.	Excluded N=78
	Domain: Main body/content reading. Approach: intercultural competence, CLIL and PBL not related to EFL didactics, assessment, and teaching strategies or without a constructive approach towards a pedagogical design.	Excluded N= 66
Included	Papers included for final analysis. N=   32

Note. Modified from Moher et al. (2010)

A hybrid perspective to a model design for ICC pedagogical intervention

Pedagogical intervention is defined as a proposal of actions and activities aimed at improving, changing, or impacting a particular situation or instruction to achieve educational goals (Montano & Álvarez, 2023). New paths to learning and teaching can be experimented by a willing educator to innovate praxis and contribute in that way to solve educational problems by interconnecting domains from real-life issues, theory, and practice (Hanks, 2022; Porto et al., 2021).

A pedagogical intervention should be supported by teaching principles and educational theories to build strong foundations. Therefore, designing a pedagogical intervention requires structure and organization of instructional and contextualized methodological procedures under a careful selection of objectives, content, strategies, techniques, and assessment (Black & Wiliam, 2018; Cubero-Vásquez, 2022; Montano & Álvarez, 2023).

It is undeniable the power that teachers have as transformative agents in the classroom and in the life of learners, a power that can be wisely used by researching, experimenting, and changing mediation practices and didactics (Toom et al., 2021; Cubero-Vásquez 2022; Reinius et al., 2022). To achieve this goal, a solid theoretical platform must be embraced to develop students’ skills, competencies, knowledge, desired behaviors, and attitudes. Structuring a pedagogical experience provides students with the opportunity to participate in novel tasks that can potentially impact their learning outcomes in a much broader scope (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2019; Cubero,2023; Woods & Copur-Gencturk, 2024).

A pedagogical intervention intended to improve a particular teaching practice should consider principles from critical pedagogy to implicate educators in the reflection and examination of practices, values, and notions associated with their teaching style. In the field of language teaching and learning, valuable principles can be borrowed from Freire’s framework of critical pedagogy (1958) to create an enriched and democratized language learning environment. Specially because a second or foreign language teaching is understood to be socially and culturally framed. Therefore, language learners should embark on an integral learning process pursuing intercultural and linguistic objectives, moving away from simplistic and monolinguistic instruction. Herrera-Molina and Portilla-Quintero (2021) pinpoint the need to create more learning opportunities to involve critical pedagogy as an axis of education that stands for social change. Advances in that path have taken place thanks to the rising interest in educating a new generation of citizens. In the context of language learning, Crawford-Lange (1982) highlights core notions from critical pedagogy to implicate learners in meaningful and significant instructional learning to develop students’ critical thinking through the analysis and reflection of real-life problems via dialogical methods (Crookes & Ziegler, 2021; Graham, 2021). Using a dialogical style in a learning environment is a powerful tool that can transform and support the social aim of education, placing educators and learners as active participants who seek, interact, grow, and learn together within an active learning community.

The language classroom can replicate that inspiring collaborative learning by pursuing multiple learning objectives instead of focusing on monolinguistic objectives. The intercultural component presents an exceptional opportunity in the language classroom to support the achievement of multivariant learning objectives. Educators have the chance to progressively approach and transform pedagogical practices into alternative, diverse, and richer ones by putting into practice pedagogical interventions that can be used to teach and measure the ICC level of acceptance and properness in a particular educational setting.

Studies that take an intercultural integration by using culture-based teaching materials and resources intended to facilitate students’ intercultural competence development in educational settings seem to be effective in improving participants intercultural development because they promote, among the broad spectrum of the issue, reflection, dialogue, self-assessment and exposure to cultural differences and similarities (Rodríguez & Puyal, 2012; Arshavskaya, 2018; Stockwell, 2016; Zhang & Zhou, 2019; Byram 2020; Cubero-Vásquez, 2022; Rodríguez & Gerke, 2022).

The ICC pedagogical intervention model proposed here merges principles from language approaches such as CLIL and PBL to favor the appropriateness and the potential benefits in terms of linguistic and intercultural development under a premise that seeks foreign/second language teaching novelty.

The selection and combination of learning principles from CLIL and PBL offer language educators the opportunity to teach and facilitate a meaningful learning process towards the development of language learners’ ICC (Cubero-Vásquez, 2021). Facilitating an intercultural experience in language educational settings requires a theoretical and practical framework to promote explicit and implicit intercultural and language input. This can be achieved when intercultural learning is mediated under well-defined objectives that ensure the development of practical communication skills, language, and cultural awareness (Byram & Fleming, 2009).

In this sense, a descriptive pedagogical model can be helpful in achieving linguistic and intercultural objectives in the language classroom, which integrally structures the language learning experience. The envisioned model views language as a tool to lead students in constructing language and intercultural knowledge within process-oriented teaching. When analyzing the potentialities and principles of each of the selected language approaches to mediate ICC, a pattern emerges suggesting that a fusion may be beneficial.

CLIL has been considered a flexible and multifaceted approach that incorporates language learning with content instruction, proving to be effective in raising students’ proficiency, cognitive engagement, confidence, and motivation (Coyle et al., 2010; Marsh et al., 2001). CLIL offers a rich learning environment where students are not only exposed to language and content but also to aspects related to context and culture. Fruitful communication requires learners to handle the nuances of the communicative act to understand and effectively interact between one another. In this light, instructing and mediating the intercultural component in the foreign/second language classroom is a vital task in fostering understanding, empathy, and critical cultural awareness between culturally different individuals (Porto, 2021; Foss et al., 2020; Feddermann et al., 2021; Baker, 2011).

From a broader perspective, CLIL can serve as a theoretical platform to mediate intercultural content by examining, exploring, comparing, and contrasting their own cultural knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and views with those of others. Learners exposed to this kind of teaching can experience a differentiated learning process richly infused with intercultural content and dialogue intended to equip learners with the skills needed to navigate this interconnected world. Additionally, PBL learning principles can be merged to excel the potential benefits in the foreign/second language classroom. PBL is a comprehensive instructional methodology that designs and proposes learning opportunities through practical, real-life projects centered on the student (Thomas, 2000). It is a dynamic methodology grounded on the active exploration of real-world issues, problems, or challenges from which learners, as main agents of the learning experience, gain knowledge and skills. Learners involved in project-based tasks use engaging questions, tasks, or problems to work collaboratively and autonomously while demonstrating higher levels of academic achievement (Bender, 2012; David, 2008; Fried-Booth, 2002; Pinzón-Castañeda, 2014).

In a PBL language environment, learners actively embark on problem-solving, decision-making, inquiry, and real product creation while supporting the development and improvement of linguistic skills, confidence, creativity, and autonomy (Kemaloglu & Sahin, 2022). As learners are motivated to work on projects, language educators can integrate, mediate, and propose intercultural projects to guide learners in the design, work, reflection, and creation of intercultural and linguistic classwork related products. Therefore, projects as learning opportunities can potentially engage students in reflective and creative conversations intended to develop skills and knowledge about one’s own culture and other foreign cultures. A combined use of these two language methodologies can potentially serve to delineate a

To provide a more straightforward view, a typology of the identified elements needed to design an intercultural pedagogical intervention in the context of EFL are presented below (see Table 2).

Table 2

Typology of a Hybrid Intercultural Pedagogical Intervention

Typology of a Hybrid Intercultural Pedagogical Intervention in the EFL classroom
Criteria	Key findings
Foreign/second language teaching	It is understood to be socially and culturally framed and therefore mediated accordingly
Purpose	Fruitful communication and engagement
Intercultural communicative competence	Leads to foster understanding, empathy, tolerance, and critical cultural awareness between culturally different individuals (beliefs, attitudes, behaviors)
Educator	Facilitator – nonbiased – cautious – aware – active
Learners	Autonomous – participant and collaborative agents – active
Approach	Combined – hybrid (CLIL & PBL) - dynamic
Planning	Structured on students’ language needs and context, practical and procedural
Content	Intercultural training- cultural knowledge- real-life issues – reflective conversations -varied themes
Class environment	Student centered -Friendly – nonthreatening – engaging – reflective – communicative – democratized
Learning strategies & activities	Dialogic – constructive – experiential –integrated -practical – novel tasks (examine, compare, contrast)- critical pedagogy – Critical thinking- creative/reflective projects
Resources	Varied (printed – digital –online - audiovisual – texts - stories)
Skills to be developed	Language skills – intercultural communicative competence

A classroom environment created to infused intercultural learning should take full advantage of varied authentic material, digital resources, technology to design intercultural language learning opportunities based on pluralistic objectives. Developmental and structured ICC model to teach not only the foreign language but intercultural issues can better prepare learners for intercultural encounters.

In this way, aligning learning principles from both approaches can maximize the opportunities for learners to enhance cultural knowledge, skills, awareness, understanding, and attitudes in engaging and interactive ways. Merging principles from both approaches can serve to design a teaching model to facilitate ICC-infused instruction in the language classroom. An instructional model based on both CLIL and PBL learning principles points out key principles that can be used to promote an intercultural teaching platform in the language classroom. The following table suggests the theoretical elements that can be fused and brought to the language classroom.

Table 3

 Hybrid Approach Principles

Learning Principles	Content & Cognition	Language & Culture	Assessment
Learner-centered experience. Facilitator is a guide/mentor. Experiential & deep learning Authentic, active, and constructive learning via tasks/projects. Direct, explicit teaching Natural language acquisition and communication Integrated learning Goal-oriented Inquiry sparks curiosity and ongoing reflection. Increases motivation, autonomy, and cooperation Personal growth. Students understand, share, apply, create, and retain.	Foreign language is promoted through content. Content relates to previous experience. Content is instructed via a foreign language. Content is meaningful. Content is tangled in the projects & tasks. Creative and critical thinking. Curiosity, reflection, autonomy. Scaffolding. Thinking skills: higher and lower. Problem-solving skills Learning to learn via collaborative tasks Inquiry and research skills.	Context relates to community. Real-life purposes. Context is a source of knowledge and learning. 21st-century skills and working life. Projects & tasks are community-driven Language production is functional. Communicative input and tasks are interconnected. Preparation for linguistic demands. Cultural knowledge and understanding Intercultural citizenship Implicit and explicit cultural exposure	Formative. Summative. Holistic. Group, peer, and self-assessment.

Note. Adapted from “Enhancing intercultural communicative competence through a CLIL and PBL hybrid approach at tertiary education: A Costa Rican approximation” by Cubero-Vásquez (2022).

Table 3 presents some principles from CLIL and PBL within a language model that can enhance the development of ICC in authentic and meaningful ways. The synergy of CLIL and PBL principles poses a singular opportunity to mediate in the language classroom a repertoire of activities intended to teach, learn, and support language, communication, content, context, cognition, and interculturality where educators act as practical language mentors. The eclectic nature that brings the fusion of these two methods is particularly important and relies on novelty and active learning to achieve much more effective linguistic and intercultural language objectives. As stated by Cubero-Vásquez (2021), “Incorporating these principles can be suitable to structure a workable approach of varied learning tasks that may result in observable learners’ development in knowledge, skills, attitudes, language and ICC” (p. 271). Therefore, it is expected that a hybrid model of ICC could guide language learners to work, study, and learn through intercultural content, varied communicative tasks, and projects carefully designed as learning opportunities to reflect, understand, and support content learning, cognitive skills, and second/foreign language development.

In this sense, it is fundamental to highlight the instrumental value of teaching a foreign language to pursue varied learning objectives and curricular goals such as the promotion of critical pedagogy, intercultural citizenship, intercultural awareness, and language competence progression.

In this envisioned model, intercultural and language skills are mediated explicitly and consciously, but also incidentally through the engagement of language students in varied language activities, projects, performance-oriented tasks, and content-based activities that can be systematically and progressively introduced in the lesson planning.

Figure 1

Hybrid Approach to ICC

Note. This model was produced by Cubero-Vásquez in 2022 illustrating the hybrid approach towards ICC development. From “Enhancing intercultural communicative competence through a CLIL and PBL hybrid approach at tertiary education: A Costa Rican approximation” by Cubero-Vásquez (2022).

Hybrid model to ICC: Instructional procedures for a pedagogical intervention

The combination of CLIL and PBL learning principles suggests a dynamic learning environment that supports learners’ ICC towards the promotion of formative and holistic possibilities for integral learning (Sánchez-Palacios, 2017; Cubero-Vásquez, 2022). Developing an ICC pedagogical proposal should be characterized as a procedural and systematic process that involves reflective thinking about the various factors that influence a learning experience of this sort (Porto & Byram, 2018; Vieluf & Göbel, 2019; Cubero, 2021). Consequently, the model process suggested consists of several stages intended to design an intercultural language learning framework in the context of second/foreign language instruction. The suggested instructional steps are thought to provide aligned instruction to support and sustain students’ ICC development through active learning (Cubero-Vásquez,2022). Complementing students’ foreign language training along with intercultural content provides comprehensive and relevant teaching that integrally prepares learners to interact better, communicate, and relate to others in an increasingly culturally diverse world (Clouet, 2012; Smakova & Paulsrud, 2020). 

For that reason, the pedagogical model proposes eight steps to plan the learning experience considering, the context, learning objectives, language and instructional approach principles, classroom observation, and assessment throughout the learning process. This model has coined the acronym “ISUACAFO” in which each letter stands for concepts linked to the fundamental phases required to prepare and plan an intercultural communicative pedagogical instruction in the foreign/ second language classroom (Cubero-Vásquez, 2022).

Figure 2

ISUACAFO: Procedural Steps for ICC Planning

Note. This instructional model was produced by Cubero-Vásquez in 2022 illustrating the hybrid approach towards ICC development. From “Enhancing intercultural communicative competence through a CLIL and PBL hybrid approach at tertiary education: A Costa Rican approximation” by Cubero-Vásquez (2022).

Figure 2 illustrates the procedural steps proposed in the model for intercultural language learning and teaching planning. The first step explores learners’ needs as a vital step to comprehend pedagogical vision of the instruction (West, 1994; Leotta & Dolidze, 2022). This first step implicates the examination of the learning context characteristics and singularities to make decisions in the classroom (Serrano et al., 2011; Lee & Park, 2020). These decisions should permeate classroom dynamics, the selection of resources and the design of tasks that can potentially maximize language and intercultural learning exposure in a language classroom. The objectives are to define how the intercultural content will be presented and what is expected for learners to gain, learn, or improve Learners’ profiles (e.g., language level, background, interests, ICC needs, language syllabus need to be considered to delimit the ICC and language scope of the pedagogical proposal. The second stage to set an ICC instructional experience is related to establishing objectives and goals that would guide the proposal, tasks and instructional procedures educators will use including the assessment techniques and tools to determine and measure the mediation effectiveness and learners’ progression in attaining the planned linguistic and intercultural goals (Scarino, 2010; Gómez-Parra, 2020; Cubero-Vásquez,2022).

An ICC proposal must be carefully designed, examining, and considering the complexities that surround the issue of intercultural competence. It is vital to consider and reflect on the challenging questions that may emerge during the task of planning as to what and how to mediate the intercultural component in the language classroom (Cubero, 2022).

A way to deal with these challenges requires the adoption of an eclectic and integral view of ICC and its link to language learning under the principle of a lifelong learning process.

Consequently, an intercultural pedagogical intervention requires a hybrid methodology enriched by a symbiosis of theoretical language teaching principles. CLIL and PBL teaching and learning principles offer a wide variety of learning notions that can serve to effectively achieve language and intercultural objectives to foster ICC learning (Cubero, 2021).

Selecting and designing hybrid language tasks facilitates ICC integration and allows objective, formative, and holistic assessment. The following step is to build the learning experience, strategies, techniques, content, tasks, and assessments that integrate language and intercultural content to attain the targeted objectives Appointing varied authentic, contextualized material and digital resources with a cultural and language potential provides an active learning experience and enables language learners’ competency and skills. Language educators must be cautious in the process of selecting, designing, and adapting authentic materials to support the intentional language learning process (Cubero-Vásquez,2022).

The pedagogical intervention proposed in this paper needs to be designed based on a great variety of tasks sustained under a hybrid methodology that compiles well-founded core notions of educational advancement to incorporate a nontraditional and eclectic idea of teaching when mediating language, knowledge, and content.

The promotion of intercultural content serves as a bridge to reflect, learn, and develop cognitive skills (Soboleva & Obdalova,2014) and competences starting in educational contexts through the implementation of language and intercultural tasks carefully planned (language level and difficulty accordance) instructing from simple to complex tasks that instruct and engage learners in the use and management of the target language, content, and culture (Cubero-Vásquez,2022). This approach implies preparing, reflecting, and visualizing the learning experience in relation to the students’ interests, needs, and context. For that reason, a stage for observing and assessing learners’ reactions and responsiveness to the tasks, activities, and overall exposure is required to measure the impact and effectiveness of the established goals. This is an imperative stage that leads to reflection upon the level of engagement and success resulting from the ICC mediation (Cubero,2023). Students involved in the pedagogical intervention are the ones who report and display the level of satisfaction and impact from the language experience. Data and reports collected from them is systematized and interpreted to provide feedback and make decisions (Cubero-Vásquez,2022).

The stages delimit the design of an integral intercultural language experience framed on constructivist and critical pedagogy based on values, skills, and competencies required today (Topolovčan & Matijević, 2017). In this context, students’ voices are also heard and taken into consideration to measure the accomplishment of intercultural and language learning objectives. The intercultural objectives set in the language lessons should deliberately consider tasks and learning opportunities to connect, reconnect, and rediscover students’ native culture and other cultures to support the process of adopting intercultural perspectives in their foreign/second language learning process (Borghetti, 2019; Cubero,2021). The whole process is intended to guide language learners to become solidary, receptive, active, reflective, understanding, and autonomous when communicating, interacting, and learning the target language (Cubero-Vásquez,2022).

To exhibit some progress when dealing with ICC development constant, progressive, and sustained exposure to comprehensible language and cultural input is certainly required. The kind of intercultural input should be based on authentic material previously assessed to assure it is bias free and suitable to meet the intended purpose in the activities (Gray, 2000). Hence, the material needs to be carefully chosen in terms of genuineness, quality, accuracy, and contemporaneity. Themes, resources, and tasks are intended to promote interaction and student engagement with the language, content, and intercultural dimensions. The intercultural content and material should be adapted to meet the criteria of language learning, context, authenticity, and interculturally driven themes regarding target cultures and native culture, respecting its appropriateness for students’ language level, interest, and context.

In the context of any educational practice, the learning process requires a continual process of evaluation and assessment. A pedagogical intervention directed to promote ICC should include varied formative assessment tools and techniques to assess learners’ progression resulting from the combined ICC hybrid methodology. Alternative assessment techniques, such as self-assessment, reflective journals, peer reviews, interviews, and portfolios, are appropriate ways to assess intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 2020; Lange & Paige, 2003) rather than traditional methods, as no single assessment tool can effectively provide a complete picture of ICC development.

The kind of assessment proposed for the development of an ICC pedagogical intervention should be conducted eclectically using a variety of instruments such as observation checklists, participants’ e-journal entries, language, and ICC rubrics, formative task activities, and projects, which can validate, measure, and assess language students’ progress throughout the intercultural language learning experience.

To exemplify, the process of conducting learning projects as tools not only to mediate the learning process but to measure language and ICC progression requires constant communication, autonomy, and self-monitoring on behalf of the students. To achieve these domains certain aspects should be taken into consideration to ensure the effectiveness of the process. The following criteria are proposed to guide students through the project process, supporting a platform for foreign/second language skills and intercultural learning (Cubero-Vásquez, 2022).

¾    The project’s driving question or problem is linked to the students’ context, community, interest, culture, and real-life situations.

¾    Project tasks and final products reflect authentic and practical purposes.

¾    The project process promotes learners’ voices and authentic learning. Students take significant responsibility and autonomy in deciding how to conduct their projects.

¾    The project reflects sustained inquiry, making use of resources to actively construct and reflect on questions, knowledge, culture, and language.

¾    The project highlights sufficient ideas connected to ICC and cultural identity around native and target cultures.

¾    The project is equally constructed since students work collaboratively, benefiting from each participant’s language and cognitive skills to complete the project tasks.

¾    Students ask for feedback on their work and ask for support on language needs to revise ideas and create their products successfully.

¾    Collaborative and individual learning facilitates language, content, and ICC progression through the work on project tasks.

¾    The project shows students’ self-assessment and monitoring of language and intercultural goals.

¾    Digital tools are used to support content illustration, allowing language engagement, interest, and interaction.

¾    Students use proper foreign language skills to present their work, considering content, pronunciation, grammar mechanics, and oral delivery.

Based on the different assessment tools, language educators can get sufficient data to make decisions regarding the process, content, units, tasks, projects, resources, number of tasks, and level of difficulty of teaching material.

Table 4

Mapping an ICC pedagogical intervention for an English course (A2)

Week	Topics	ICC insights	Objectives	ICC
1	Globalization	-Costa Rica’s historical origins. -Costa Rica’s early economy.	-Relate the country’s efforts to grow by exploring its historical origins. -Identify international commerce remarks and their role in the global market.	*K *S *A *CA
2
3	Tourism: Costa Rican beauty	-Concept of beauty and critical awareness	-Learn about tourism in Costa Rica and its beautiful venues. -Understand their own cultural ideology with respect to beauty.
4
5	Blue zones: happiness and tempo	-Chronemics -Notions of happiness	-Find out about cultural norms and practices of different blue zones of the world. -Identify Costa Rican cultural norms and lifestyle that promote longevity and happiness
6
7	Jobs and diversity	-Cultural diversity -Stereotypes	-Find out about cultural stereotypes and possible impact on communication by watching a movie. -Recognize and respect cultural diversity while communicating with people from different cultures.
8
9	Achievement and success	Individualism and collectivism	-Compare and analyze individualistic and collectivistic cultures. -Learn about famous peoples’ goals and achievements
10
11	Communication in the workplace	Communication styles and culture awareness	-Learn about some key aspects and business etiquette at the workplace. -Get familiar with and compare some cultural values from different countries in business and at the workplace.
12
13	Intercultural citizenship	Intercultural citizenship	-Find out about the meaning and implications of global citizenship. -Propose ideas to act as agents of change to make a difference in their community.

Note. *K: knowledge - *S: skills - *A: attitude - * CA: critical awareness. Retrieved from “Enhancing intercultural communicative competence through a CLIL and PBL hybrid approach at tertiary education: A Costa Rican approximation” by Cubero-Vásquez (2022).

Integrating the intercultural component in the language classroom a plausible and advisable aim. Educators interested in providing foreign/second language learners an integral learning experience should adopt a different mindset in terms of envisioning, planning, and designing language and intercultural tasks in nontraditional ways which can be done if a structured teaching is infused with intercultural content, varied resources and tasks are facilitated in the language classroom. 

A pedagogical intervention intended to provide participants with an intercultural language learning experience needs to be supported by the combination and implementation of a holistic and hybrid approach of principles to ensure authentic, resourceful, and consistent opportunities to strengthen linguistic competence, intercultural competence, skills development, and growth. The combined use of CLIL and PBL principles provides a beneficial theoretical platform to support a pedagogical intervention to ICC enhancement under an organized language learning instruction that exposes language learners to intercultural and language input. A hybrid methodology presents a contextual, interactive, and dynamic way to teach learners, leading them to develop competencies and skills useful to their professional lives. The teaching principles highlighted to support the learning experience play a fundamental role in reminding educators of factors that are important to consider in their mediation or teaching style. Intercultural resources infused in the language tasks potentially engages learners in authentic and real-life discussions that can be sustained through varied tasks and in favor of language skills. The model vision developed in the ISUACAFO procedural steps for ICC mediation experience proposed under the umbrella of the hybrid method provides procedural clarity to design and plan a pedagogical intervention in language and intercultural learning. Strategies and classroom tasks under this hybrid model direct attention to critical issues that play a part in the potential enhancement of learners’ target language and ICC development. Experimenting with pedagogical interventions can lead to improve language teaching didactics through innovation and a combination of existing methodologies that can be adapted according to the language learners’ context, culture, interests, and needs. There is an explicit call to approach the complexities of foreign language and ICC in the context of educational settings and teachers play a fundamental role in the way practices are changed.

Conflicto de intereses / Competing interests:

La autora declara que no incurre en conflictos de intereses.

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