Intercultural Competence a New Goal for English Learners

Abstract

The use of language in the appropriate social and cultural context is a must. Whenever we travel abroad and meet people of different cultures we may encounter difficulties in understanding and adapting to their way of thinking, which may lead to misunderstanding and conflicts. Nowadays we must have the ability to understand people of different social profiles and accept individuals of different culture. Teaching a language by including the intercultural dimension keeps helping people to acquire linguistic competence to communicate as well as the intercultural competence. Nowadays, it is widely accepted that linguistic competence are not sufficient to have a successful communication with individuals of different culture. Intercultural competence is identified as a key point in learning a foreign language by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Intercultural competence is not only related to Teaching of foreign languages, but is part of our life and it affects all the fields. The main aim of intercultural competence is not to learn some information about the culture of that country, but how to develop skills of interaction, skills to accept new ideas and being open-minded, being tolerant, prevent misunderstanding etc. In Albania reality, the teaching of a foreign language is mostly focused in developing linguistic rather than intercultural competence. These because the teachers are not trained on how to develop it, aren’t motivated to integrate new theories in the curricula etc. In a survey resulted that most of the English teachers in secondary and high schools don’t mention or avoid cultural topics. In my opinion, culture and language are interrelated and we cannot separate them. It is time to improve the goal of teaching a foreign language. To be proficient in a language doesn’t mean you have intercultural competence for a successful communication. With the development of intercultural competence in teaching a foreign language will bring a new effective teaching method. The main aim is to enrich the process of teaching English language with intercultural competences.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v4n1s1p57