INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION CONGITION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN OUR COUNTRY AND ABROAD

Abstract

Developing the intercultural dimension of students and English language teachers revolves around the following aims: to give learners intercultural competence as well as linguistic competence; to prepare them for interaction with people of other cultures; to enable them to understand and accept people from other cultures as individuals with other distinctive perspectives, values and behaviors; and to help them to see that such interaction is an enriching experience (Byram, 2002). Thus, English language teaching should focus on improving the intercultural communication competence as a needed component. Many studies and projects conducted in our country are mainly oriented towards improving the intercultural communication competence of students. In this paper, English language teachers are chosen as a focus of a research due to the opportunities of discussing cultural topics during the English language lessons. However, integrating culture in other lessons is also very important. The reason for that are the multicultural classrooms and today’s overseas exchange opportunities in different fields (not only in English language as a subjects at school) and European projects which require intercultural competence in order to be able to participate and
knowledge in English language too. My prediction is that the teachers in our country lack training in intercultural communication competence and this competence is crucial especially when teaching students from different ethnic backgrounds and can help them achieve better results in English language and other schools subjects as well. The situation in our country and abroad will be discussed in details within this paper.