Developing Intercultural Awareness – an Ongoing Challenge in Foreign Language Teaching”

The purpose of this paper is not to outline a specific curriculum or methodology for use in the foreign language classroom, rather this paper will describe an attitude teachers and learners should adopt. A framework will be provided for understanding the cognitive patterns related to the shift from communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence. The teaching of culture is arousing great interest among foreign language teachers, nonetheless the problems most language teachers must face, such as uncertainty about which cultural aspects to teach and how to use and adapt authentic materials to integrate course books, may lead to unexpected difficulties. However, even though it is widely acknowledged that to be competent speakers in a language it is necessary to know and understand the main issues about the culture which has moulded it, in most course books, lessons concentrate on linguistic structures and forms, putting aside cultural elements: it is not unusual among teachers ‘to do on their own’. Corbett (2003) highlights that the integration of culture in the language classroom has been gaining ground in the last three decades, nonetheless it still has a marginal part.