Negotiating meaning through intercultural exchange The purpose of this presentation is to emphasize a holistic approach to second language acquisition

that draws on development of sociolinguistic competence as well as intercultural communication competence. Globalization has brought the distance between people with diverse cultural backgrounds ever closer. Colin Bakers states that the ownership of two languages has increasingly become seen as an asset as the communication world gets smaller. However, being able to use appropriate language to communicate with native interlocutors does not mean that we have the capacity to interact with others appropriately in a variety of cultural contexts. Students intercultural competence skills have to be expanded in our shrinking world. Developing intercultural awareness is a core element to all IB programmes, clearly reflected in the IB mission statement. Students should not merely acquire cultural knowledge as a series of trivia facts. Educators ought to challenge students to think at a higher level and negotiate meaning to generate culturally appropriate behavior. This presentation will be structured into four parts: (1) Discuss strategies to develop students awareness of the relationship between languages and cultures; (2) Explore ways for students experience different ways of doing, seeing, classifying, being and acting through second language acquisition process; (3) Foster higher order critical thinking skills to help students interpret, relate, discover and interact. (4) Develop students awareness of their own culture and guide students to reflect on how their culture is seen by other people from different cultural backgrounds.

Alison Ya-Wen Yang is originally from Taiwan. She graduated from Cheng-Chi University in Taiwan, and majored in Chinese literature with a minor in education. She received a Masters Degree in Education through Framingham State College in 2005. This is her tenth year entering the IB programmes. She has had experience teaching across the three IB programmes. Additionally, she is also as a MYP workshop leader, MYP Mandarin language B moderator and DP Mandarin ab initio examiner. She has been actively involved in IB activities and presented in various conferences. Prior to her teaching in Thailand, she volunteered in the UK for a year and worked as a communication facilitator, assisting the school speech therapist to develop communication programmes for students with cerebral palsy. She has benefited from this voluntary experience significantly and has applied ideas from this experience into language teaching. Currently, she teaches at KIS International School in Bangkok.