Autonomous Learning and the Acquisition of Intercultural Communicative Competence: Some Implications for Course Development

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Apart from teaching communicative language competence, foreign-language educationists also consider it a natural pedagogical aim to encourage learners to have an interest in, knowledge about and an opening towards foreign cultures, peoples and countries. This paper outlines some of the key terms and complexities that surround the advocacy of teaching foreign languages for intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It examines some of the issues involved in reconceptualising courses that were originally designed to teach communicative competence in a foreign language, to courses promoting the acquisition of ICC. It discusses criteria for selecting cultural contents and culture-and-language learning tasks, as well as ways to scaffold the ICC learning process. It takes issue with traditional culture-teaching approaches and explains why current societal developments compel us to move away from a teacher-led language-and-culture pedagogy to a student-centred autonomous learning approach.