Foreign language ability, global awareness, and intercultural communication skills are considered increasingly important for economic, civic, and social participation in the 21st century (American Council on Education, 2007; Committee for Economic Development, 2006a; Council of Chief State School Officers, 2006). In keeping with this call, today's foreign language teachers are expected to exhibit sophisticated capacities related to intercultural communication in order to develop students as self- and globally-aware participants in global societies (McCloskey, 2007). This suggests a need for greater teacher professional development (TPD) in this area. Recent studies of TPD innovations (Barnett, Keating, Harwood, & Saam, 2002; Harlen & Doubler, 2004; Wiske, Perkins, & Eddy Spicer, 2006) indicate that online learning offers teachers powerful opportunities to develop sophisticated understandings about practice. However, little of the empirical research has investigated foreign language TPD or intercultural competencies, partly because there are few opportunities addressing those audiences and priorities. I studied one such opportunity, an online course for foreign language teachers from around the world that prepared them to facilitate intercultural learning opportunities for the students. I investigated the dimensions of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), as defined by Byram (1997), that eighteen teacher-learner participants displayed and/or developed through participation in this online TPD course, as well as their pedagogical knowledge about cultivating ICC in students. I also analyzed the features of the course's design and implementation that appeared to promote these displays and developments of intercultural and pedagogical competence. I studied these features in terms of an original analytic framework for effective ICC-related TPD (McCloskey, 2007).
This study reveals that foreign language teachers, even in an interculturally rich environment, do not readily seize opportunities to advance their own ICC. However, this study also suggests that online TPD that unites teachers across cultures around the shared purpose of promoting intercultural learning offers many powerful opportunities to cultivate the teachers' ICC and related pedagogical competencies. Careful choices about TPD design and implementation could lead teacher-learners more directly towards these outcomes. I conclude by discussing recommendations for such choices with reference to a revised version of the analytic framework, based on this study's findings.
