Text 10A1-I 

There is no doubt that we are living in times of great change. Population mobility continues throughout the world at an all-time high in human history, bringing extensive cross-cultural contact among diverse language and cultural groups. Predictions focus on an increasingly interconnected world, with global travel and instant international communications available to more and more people. Businesses and professions seek employees fluent in more than one language, to participate in the international marketplace as well as to serve growing ethnolinguistic minorities living within each community. Employers increasingly want their employees to be interculturally competent. They want them to be skilful negotiators in increasingly intercultural work situations.

Change is not exclusive or selective in terms of the sectors of society which it affects. Industry, health, politics and business are affected, but also education. In different parts of Europe, just as elsewhere in the world, the presence of ethnic and linguistic minority children in schools is becoming an everyday phenomenon. Policy makers include intercultural objectives in curricula, and teachers find themselves faced with the challenge of promoting the acquisition of intercultural competence through their teaching. This is true for teachers of a diversity of subjects. It is definitely true for teachers of foreign languages. Foreign language education is, by definition, intercultural. Bringing a foreign language to the classroom means connecting learners to a world that is culturally different from their own. Therefore, all foreign language educators are now expected to exploit this potential and promote the acquisition of intercultural competence in their learners. The objective of language learning is no longer defined in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence in a foreign language. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence.

Lies Sercu. Teaching foreign languages in an intercultural world. In: Lies Sercu et al. Foreign language teachers and intercultural competence: an international investigation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005 (adapted)