Sociocultural Strategies for a Dialogue of Cultures

Abstract

There is often a lack of learner opportunity for beyond‐the‐classroom interaction in school foreign language programs. This lack of opportunity places learners at considerable disadvantage when confronted with the inevitable psychological, linguistic, and sociocultural obstacles in second language communication (Savignon, 1972, 1983, 1997; Sysoyev, 1999a, 2001). In this article, we report the findings of a study that attempted to operationalize the concept of sociocultural competence for classroom learners and explore the benefit to learners of explicit training in strategies for coping with certain social and cultural situations. The goal of our study was to promote learners' sociocultural competence with a view to preparing them for a dialogue of cultures (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Bibler, 1991) essential to intercultural communication. Our report includes 3 sections: (a) a taxonomy of sociocultural strategies, (b) the description of a method of explicit strategy training developed for use in a Russian high school English as a foreign language (EFL) program, and (c) the outcome of an experimental program in explicit instruction in sociocultural strategies with a class of 11th grade EFL learners.