Intercultural Communication in Practice: An Integration of the Intercultural Approach in the Algerian EFL Classroom

Abstract

Twenty-first century foreign language pedagogy has strongly insisted on the promotion of the fifth language skill that combines language and culture in a harmonizing fashion. Many foreign language educators have reached a high level of awareness about the need of developing intercultural competence. Yet, despite such awareness, it remains unclear to many of them just when and how this can be integrated in their classroom practice. Hence, this paper tends to suggest a functional course design that demonstrates the implementation of the intercultural approach through operational techniques, tasks and lesson plans for the purpose of developing learners’ linguistic and intercultural communicative competence (knowledge, skills, attitudes) in the Algerian EFL classroom. The courses also aim to raise students’ cultural awareness, to train them on how to deal with cultural diversity in and outside the classroom by making them active analysts and interpreters of the target culture as well as their native one, and more importantly to develop attitudes of openness, curiosity, empathy, non-judgmental thinking and prevent cultural shocks, misunderstandings, stereotypes and prejudices. The proposed intercultural pedagogy aims to make some of the ICC issues accessible and manageable to EFL practitioners, as it tries to answer questions in both practical and principled ways.