The Role of Intercultural Competence in Foreign Language Teaching

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The Role of Intercultural Competence in Foreign Language Teaching Throughout the history of foreign language teaching, there has always been this concern of what we actually want to make out of learners. Within this trend, many concepts have emerged paving the ground to two prominent schools; one that focused on language itself i.e. Chomsky’s Linguistic Competence and another that focused on the pragmatic competence i.e. Dell Hymes’s Communicative Competence. However, those two trends seemed to lose popularity as a new concept started to take shape and which is the recognition of the cultural dimension as a key component in language teaching and learning (Atay et al, 2009). This review is a report on a study that aimed at investigating how 503 EFL English teachers perceive and adhere to the promotion of intercultural competence in their classrooms. The intercultural dimension is of particular importance in the teaching of a foreign language to many teachers and researchers today. This importance does not emanate only from the inherent cultural aspect of language, but also from a modern tendency that sees interculturality as a requirement for the individual’s transition from national to global identity. What can be implied here is that for an individual to be interculturally competent, s/he has to “behave adequately in a flexible manner when confronted with actions, attitudes and expectations of representatives of foreign cultures” (Meyer, 1991,). Taking this into account, we can say that teaching learners to be interculturally competent depends to a large extent on how teachers view the concept of interculturality and how much of it is incorporated in their teaching agenda. In the research subject of this report, 503 Turkish EFL teachers were randomly selected with the aim to investigate their attitudes on intercultural competence and to examine to what degree

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