INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

It is generally acknowledged nowadays that culture and language are inseparable and there exists a \ndirect connection between a culture and the language used by its members. Culture occupies a \nprominent position on the foreign language teaching agenda for the time being and the role of \ncultural learning has become one of the essential issues in foreign language teaching theory today. \nThere are a lot of definitions of “culture” suggested by different authors from various perspectives. \nFor us as teachers of English as a foreign language one of the most useful approaches in this \ncontext might be the definition provided by G. Hofstede who sees culture as “collective \nprogramming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from \nanother”. M. Seidl proposes to consider a concept of culture that links it to a language-oriented \nanalysis that in turn defines culture in terms of the norms and values shared by the members of a \nsocial group. The author states “language proficiency, … is a matter of familiarity with commonly \nheld norms and values which constitute hidden meaning encoded in discourse structures”. She \nbelieves that when someone learns a foreign language and wants to understand another culture it is \nnot enough to come to terms with another lexical or grammatical code. One has to view the world \nfrom a different perspective since speaking another language means adopting another point of view. \n