The Trainingspices project: Socrates Grundtvig 1.1 training courses project SPICES SPICES is the acronym for Social Promotion of Intercultural Communication Expertise and Skills.
Why “expertise” and “skills” and not simply “competence”?Nowadays there is a stronger awareness that in many fields of knowledge the expertise as theoretical knowledge is no longer sufficient for being successful on the labor market. A strong stress has to be put on the practical skills related to theoretical knowledge, i.e. the ability to apply the theoretical knowledge. But the ability to apply the theoretical knowledge has also to be trained. This ability is not given for granted by having a strong knowledge in some academic field. Vice-versa it is not sufficient having good skills without a necessary theoretical background, what would mean that certain behavioral skills would be applied in an uncritical way, as a 'receipt' without being aware of what is really going on in a certain situation. This is especially evident for the field of communication: even knowing everything of all the existing communication theories does not guarantee one to be or become a good communicator. Even more complicated is it when the communication goes on between individuals referring to different cultural backgrounds, values, beliefs, behavior models. So, in order to acquire a complete intercultural communication competence. it is extremely important, in a training course (like the one we are going to work out within SPICES), to focus on both aspects - expertise and skills - as the two sides of the same medal. While the expertise - as theoretical competence - is easier to acquire, the intercultural communication skills - as practical competence - have to be acquired through personal experience and/or tough training.
Why “social promotion”?Intercultural communication trainings - or more often labeled as “international communication trainings” - are not new. In fact since several decades there are such trainings especially for managers and staff of multinational companies. The Spices training courses will focus on the “social promotion” of “intercultural communication expertise and skills”, i. e. the promotion of intercultural communication expertise and skills will have a social not so much an economic purpose; in other words, its overall aim is to widespread as much as possible such competence in a very concrete and practical sense through the training of intercultural communication facilitators, mediators, educators, L2 language teachers (as direct targets of the Spices project) who will then become a vehicle for further training of final adult beneficiaries (indirect targets of Spices) who would need that intercultural communication competence.
The Project language: EnglishSome outputs of the project will be in other languages: German, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Slovenian, Bulgarian.
The Project IdeaThe starting points for this project lie in two pre-scientific observations:
- foreigners have communication problems mostly in bureaucratic-institutional
- situations of interaction
- textbooks do not really take into account the linguistic-communicative needs related
- to these problems
Thus the main goal is building up a guideline describing a method for the creation of ICC & Lc/L2 training modules through learning & teaching packs. |
