Intercultural Competence In Language Learning

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged nowadays that culture and language are inseparable and there exists a direct connection between a culture and the language used by its members. Culture occupies a prominent position on the foreign language teaching agenda for the time being and the role of cultural learning has become one of the essential issues in foreign language teaching theory today. There are a lot of definitions of culture suggested by different authors from various perspectives. For us as teachers of English as a foreign language one of the most useful approaches in this context might be the definition provided by G. Hofstede who sees culture as collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another . M. Seidl proposes to consider a concept of culture that links it to a language-oriented analysis that in turn defines culture in terms of the norms and values shared by the members of a social group. The author states language proficiency, is a matter of familiarity with commonly held norms and values which constitute hidden meaning encoded in discourse structures . She believes that when someone learns a foreign language and wants to understand another culture it is not enough to come to terms with another lexical or grammatical code. One has to view the world from a different perspective since speaking another language means adopting another point of view.