Teaching And Assessing Intercultural Competence In EFL Teaching Context : A Model for Algerian EFL classrooms

Abstract

This extended essay serves to introduce some practical in-class techniques aiming to develop intercultural competence taking into account the Algerian EFL context. The development of intercultural communicative skills, in this regard, intercultural competence, represents the rationale of foreign language pedagogy. Consequently, learning a language is no longer viewed in terms of a continuum whose end-point is the native speaker’s use of the language, but rather as the ability to become intercultural speaker, hence, the shift from the native speaker norm to the intercultural speaker model. In this research work, we will see that the intercultural approach to foreign language teaching is, largely explicitly, based on not only the target cultures, but also the mainstream culture, i.e. the learner’s home culture.At this level, the process of contactcomparison with otherness is at the very core of this approach, and it is this process which helps learners to establish a relationship between their own and other cultures, and ultimately cope with the differences in develop the sense of tolerance vis-à-vis others’ cultural differences. In effect this extended essay strives to suggest a set of techniques that may serve as a conceptual pedagogical framework for the development of intercultural communicative abilities.