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Abstract
The 'Intercultural Dimension' is nowdays part of the language teaching. Its aims are to give learners intercultural competence and linguistic competence, to prepare them for interaction with people of other cultures, to enable them to understand people from other cultures as individuals with other distinctive perspectives, values and behaviours, and to help them to see that such interaction is an enriching experience. The components of intercultural competence are knowledge, skills and attitudes, complemented by the values one holds because of one's belonging to a number of social groups. Understanding the 'Intercultural Dimension' requires skills of comparison, of interpreting and relating and critical cultural awareness. Some useful techniques that can be successfully used in the intercultural approach are student exchanges, e-mails, project works and films. Systematic intercultural training is a precondition for educating a new generation of young people who will tolerate, understand, accept, and respect people from different world cultures.
Keywords: intercultural education, knowledge, skills, attitudes, intercultural teacher.
Nowadays, teaching and learning a foreign language does not mean only direct teaching of linguistic skills such as phonology, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax. Learning a language well usually involves knowledge about the culture of that language. Communication that does not have appropriate cultural content often results in humorous incidents due to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Besides grammatical competence, a culturally competent learner must possess sociolinguistic competence, pragmatic competence, sociocultural knowledge, and intercultural awareness. Culture, according to one definition, is the values, traditions, customs, art, and institutions shared by a group of people who are unified by nationality, ethnicity, religion, or language.
The language teaching profession's interest in cross-cultural communication has increased during the past few decades. According to Kramsch (1995), this development is due to political, educational, and ideological factors; even though politicians might feel that learning a foreign language will solve socioeconomic problems, educators think that for that to happen a language course must contain legitimate cultural content.
Culture is a very broad concept, so it would be useful to distinguish between the so-called big-C culture and small-c culture. The big-C part of a given culture is usually easy to study, as it represents factual knowledge about the fine arts such as literature, music, dance, painting, sculpture, theater, and film. Small-c culture, on the...