Opportunities to Develop Intercultural Communicative Competence in Czech lower-secondary schools: Findings of the IRSE Video Study of German

The empirical study deals with the topic of teaching intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in Czech lower-secondary German classes. The aim of the study is to investigate the quantity and quality of the opportunities to develop ICC, the proportion of activities aimed at developing the cognitive, affective, and behavioural component of ICC, the proportion of activities focused on Big-C Culture and small-c culture and culture-general and culture-specific topics. The introductory part and the following part of the study introduce its theoretical background, and terminology is then followed by the methodological part describing the sample (28 German lessons of 7 teachers videotaped in the 8^th and 9^th grades of Czech lower-secondary classes at seven schools in Jihomoravský region within the IRSE Video Study of German¹ project), the way of processing the data (recording, transcription, coding), the research questions and a system of categories (a system for assessing teaching ICC), that was used for analyses of the videotaped lessons. The findings show that emphasis is put on the cognitive component of ICC, while the other components (behavioural and affective) stay at the background. These results are consistent with the results of the IRSE Video Study of English project (Zerzová, 2012), which has the potential of initiating discussion for both English and German language teaching methodologies.