The intercultural dimension in language teaching: perspectives from the teaching of English and French

The twin Masters programmes offered by the Hellenic Open University (HOU) in Teaching English and French as Foreign Languages share many characteristics. For example, they address the continuing development of teachers whose professional home is located in foreign language education in the shared socio-cultural Greek context. However, as well as sharing some similarities, each programme has its own particularities regarding the content and ways of exploring it. For those who collaborated in the development of these programmes, such particularities and similarities stimulated an ongoing concern with the appropriacy of the emerging approaches on each programme. In this article, we explore the theme of appropriate methodology with a particular focus on the module on each programme which addresses the intercultural dimension of language teaching. These explorations identify some of the particularities and similarities in this topic area. They also enable us to speculate about the broader theme of appropriate methodology as it applies to these two programmes and their similar spheres of professional practice.