Venice International University inaugurates the series of the VIULECTURES 1|15, a cycle of appointments open to the public, as part of the Globalization Program Spring 2015 term academic offer.

First meeting on 22 April 2015 with Prof. Paolo Balboni of University Ca’ Foscari Venice, to discuss about “Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Model”. The lecture will be held in English.

Over nearly five decades the Council of Europe and the Common European framework have been working on the Modern Language Projects, to study and promote a model able to generate communicative performance along with communicative competence: we are moving from the language taught as form to the language as a communicative tool, and though some local variations in the trend, the communicative focus has now overwhelmed the formal attention. We learn how to understand and to speak, aiming for efficacy rather than correctness: the European labels of competence (i.e. the well-known A1-2. B1-2, C1-2 levels) are founded on the “know-how” of the foreign language. But this real use of the language in international contexts, increasingly frequent and present in everyday life, rightly addresses another problem: people from diverse cultures may interpret differently the same words, gestures, values: “university”, “professor”, “test”, “grade” are quite easily translatable concepts, as are “state”, “citizen”, “democracy”, “government” – but the idea linked to these concepts is different for an Italian, a Brazilian, an Arab or a Chinese person. While talking, even common words may be overlaid with dissimilar concepts. This open lecture aims to propose a model of description of the critical points in intercultural communication, so that each person may start creating a personal handbook, site, index, database,…