Abstract
The development of intercultural communicative competence in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) education in many countries is still a difficult goal to achieve. EFL teachers and learners require more tangible and concrete methodological approaches to foster this important competence in the classroom. Therefore, this reflection article aims at proposing the use of genre-based learning as a significant communicative language approach to foster English learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) through a Sequence of Critical Thinking Tasks. Through two samples of genres, the article explains how the skills of discovery, of interpreting, and of relating, contained in the concept of ICC, can be articulated, complemented, and enhanced gradually through a set of more specific Critical Thinking Tasks. These mental skills can be useful to help learners understand, discover, interpret, and evaluate critically elements of deep culture that appear in different documents, genres, or texts produced by English-spoken cultures, other language communities, and learners’ own culture. Doing critical thinking tasks through genre-based approach can constitute a preliminary but significant step to enhance English learners’ critical intercultural awareness in EFL learning environments.
Highlights
During the past twenty years, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become a main teaching goal and a research topic in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) education. This field has become aware that English learners should learn linguistic rules and communicative functions as encouraged by the tenets of communicative language teaching, and recognize, understand, and appreciate cultural patterns, viewpoints, and beliefs of learners’ own culture, target English-speaking cultures, and other language communities, in this growing globalized world (Kramsch, 1993; Fantini, 1999; Knutson, 2006; Moeller & Nugent, 2014)
It is a fact that ICC is still difficult to be developed in EFL education because English teachers generally emphasize the study of language forms and communicative functions
The EFL teacher is not expected to know and teach all the cultural information of other communities or nations, but rather to help learners develop critical thinking skills that could lead them to discover and interpret implicit cultural meanings in different types of foreign genres and documents, which are materials naturally imbued of cultural messages
Summary
During the past twenty years, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become a main teaching goal and a research topic in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) education. The first one relies on the fact that many EFL teachers think that they lack appropriate knowledge and teaching approaches to teach contents of the Anglophone or other foreign cultures They find it difficult to grasp and promote the apparent intangible components/skills of ICC, and think they are neither English-native speaker, nor members of English or other language communities to be entitled to teach their cultures. EFL teachers may find it difficult to teach English, and to help learners identify, understand, and deal with invisible and complicated meanings of deep culture, since many learners cannot hold intercultural interactions with citizens from the Anglo-Saxon culture or other cultures of the world Because of these disadvantages in EFL contexts, this reflection article proposes and examines how English teachers can promote ICC development more tangibly with instructional materials they often use in the language classroom by putting into practice the principles of genre-based approach and the support of critical thinking tasks. The articulation of these theoretical perspectives aim at helping teachers with practical pedagogical proposals on how they can include cultural contents and enhance ICC easier and more purposely in the communicative language classroom
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