Building the Intercultural Competence : Readiness and Methods

Abstract

The present research aims at measuring the readiness of EFL teachers as well as investigating the different approaches adopted by them in order to help in building the intercultural competence among EFL students to be able to cope with globalization imposed by the fastpaced social change. Being a global citizen having the flexibility to adequately react in multicultural environments is the new perspective of the English language teaching polices in Algeria.To measure the EFL teachers' readiness to include intercultural components besides the language profeciency and in order to investigate the different methods adopted by them to help in building students' intercultural competence, a structured interview was conducted with a number of 06 English language teachers at the department of English in the Univerity of El- Oued. Results reveal that EFL teachers are a.\ryare of the students' increasing demand to master not only English but the cultural dimension also associated with situations that require English as a medium of communication such as involving in interviews related to job opportunities, studying abraod and participating in AIESEC programmes devoted to the youth where they have to pass interviews with high-ups from different social and cultural backgrounds. For this reason, teachers tend to integrate new language teaching practices in the classroom based on an inevitable combination of language skills and intercultural competency by focusing on values, attitudes and knowledge about other people's cultures and otherness studies. Teachers also add that their task is getting easier with the technological advances since the internet revolutionized people's lifestyles. In other words they argue that students come to class with prior worldviews and holistic viewpoints on the other because of the widespread use of the internet. Teachers also add that they resort to various models of intercultural competence to create learning tasks that help students to gain intercultural competence. Results led to the construction of pedagogical implications that highlight the importance of encouraging the teaching methods that consider the cultural dimension at the heart of the foreign language teachinÿlearning process because language and culture are inextricably linked.