Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

We live in a diverse world that is full of differences, a world that contains different cultures and languages. It is our language along with our culture, which defines our identities and perspectives. Thus, speakers identify themselves through their use of language. In fact, this is why cultural competence is considered one of the essential components of the communicative competence. It is believed that culture needs to be part of our foreign language (FL) classrooms in order to make students aware of the cultural features ( e.g. skills, attitudes, lifestyles, and also knowledge) reflected in the language they are learning. Thus, the ultimate goal of this presentation is to investigate teachers and students’ views and attitudes towards the integration of the intercultural communicative competence in the FL classrooms. It attempts to investigate the extent to which teachers implement culture in their teaching. Also, the study aims at investigating the alternative practices and techniques teachers are more likely to resort to in order to develop and improve their students’ intercultural communicative competence. The respondents of this study were selected randomly and they were asked to fill in a questionnaire. The findings show the way in which almost all the respondents believe that the integration of culture in foreign language classrooms has a vital role in developing the learner’s communicative competence. The findings also show that the teachers also tend to use more often cultural features and practices in order to make students culturally aware of the language they are learning.