Pathways to Cultural Competence in Second Language Classrooms
The intercultural dimension of the language learning experience is one that has
taken on increasing significance over the past decades. As Byram (2018) reminded
us, "intercultural competence" (IC) as a term of relevance to language pedagogy
arose in the 1980s as a development to "communicative competence." The construct
of communicative competence was, by that time, beginning to become embedded as
informing the principal aim of language teaching and learning programmes. That is,
for many years students have been learning languages in a variety of ways and in a
range of different contexts, but with a primary goal of learning how to communicate
in the target language (TL). However, as TL users in real-world contexts initiate
communication with TL speakers, they are necessarily confronted with situations that
move communication beyond the pure use of language and require them to negotiate
with, as Byram (e.g., 2021) put it, beliefs, meanings, values and behaviours that may
be very different from their own. This has implications for effective communication.
Indeed, all TL interactions are encounters with "otherness" that require navigation
beyond just choosing the appropriate words for the context; hence the emergence of
IC as a construct of interest in language education.
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