Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence (IPIC)
- Levels: High school, university
- Languages: Chinese, Spanish
- Cost: Free of charge during pilot
At CASLS, we believe language is more than vocabulary and grammar. Our curriculum materials help students learn how to understand context, create the meanings they intend, and build relationships with speakers of other languages. These functions of language are difficult to assess, which is why we’ve dedicated our efforts to developing an intercultural assessment.
Our Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence (IPIC) framework helps assess students’ abilities to use the target language appropriately in multilingual interactions. It is the first assessment of its kind to combine intercultural, pragmatic, and interactional constructs.
The IPIC framework uses digital simulations to determine students’ abilities to navigate intercultural encounters with varying power and social distance using the target language. This intercultural assessment simulation allows for an individualized experience and accounts for language variation. It creates a learner profile based on four dimensions critical to language competence: knowledge, analytical abilities, subjectivity, and awareness.
Intercultural assessment alone cannot help students develop the type of communicative proficiency that we believe is the heart of language learning. The IPIC framework’s accompanying professional development materials (coming soon) support educators in creating a classroom environment that allows learners the opportunity to practice the art of communication.
The IPIC framework is a partnership with the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC).