Intercultural Communicative Competence in EFL Textbooks

San Miguel de Tucumán

Conferencia; XXXVI FAAPI 2011: Communicative Language Teaching and Learning Revisited. What more than three decades of experience have taught us; 2011

FAAPI & APIT

With the advent of Communicative Language Teaching, it is claimed that the acquisition of a foreign language in a classroom setting entails the development of several competences, namely grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic competences (Canale & Swain, 1980 in Byram, 1997). Further development in the field of TEFL has expanded on the concept of learner competences, including several others that learners need to build up in order to communicate effectively. According to van Ek (1986, in Byram, 1997) communicative ability involves six competences: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic, sociocultural and social competence. Intercultural awareness and reflection are a crucial dimension foreign language teaching and learning should aim at developing. Alptekin (2002:58) points out that ?learning a foreign language becomes a kind of enculturation, where one acquires new cultural frames of reference and a new world view, reflecting those of the target language culture and its speakers.In this paper we aim at analyzing how EFL coursebooks, which are currently employed for elementary level General English courses in Córdoba, Argentina, contribute to the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and we seek to find answers to the following questions: How is intercultural awareness raised in EFL textbooks? What kinds of instructional practices do the coursebooks deploy for the development of intercultural communicative competence? What are the most recurrent types of activities offered for that purpose? Answers to these questions will be sought in two locally produced EFL coursebooks and three international/global textbooksICC involves not only linguistic knowledge but also skills and attitudes. Our analysis is based on Byram's definition of intercultural competence as "the ability to communicate and interact across cultural boundaries" (1997:7). The analysis makes use of a checklist designed to examine the textbooks from an intercultural perspective. In the results section, we explore the findings made in the corpus and we conclude with a summary of the main trends observed.