Raising EFL Teachers Awareness about the Enhancement of Learners Intercultural Communication through Teaching Intercultural Linguistics

Abstract

The aim of the current research paper is to raise EFL teachers’ awareness about the enhancement of students’ intercultural communication through the teaching of intercultural linguistics. A limited knowledge of intercultural linguistics could lead to low intercultural competence, miscommunication, and cultural bias. To explore EFL teachers’ views about this issue, a structured questionnaire was administered online within the quantitative descriptive method to a total of 86 teachers of English from different Algerian provinces located in the north, south, east, and west of the country. Findings indicated that the main barriers to intercultural communication are: cultural differences (73.25%), vocabulary (56.97%), as well as stereotypes and prejudices (44.18%). Furthermore, 77.9% of the participants agreed that intercultural linguistics is not included in the syllabi. In addition, 98.83% of the informants stressed the necessity to integrate cultural linguistics in the syllabi. Moreover, 84.88% of the teachers advocated the need for a shift in focus from teaching cultural linguistics to teaching intercultural linguistics. The same percentage (84.88%) appreciated teaching intercultural linguistics as a separate module. Concerning the aspects that teachers should focus on while teaching intercultural linguistics, two main factors were selected by the population: enhancing intercultural communicative competence and performance (86.04%) and promoting cultural and intercultural cognition (56.97%).