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Choose the best alternative according to the text: Nowadays, it is a widely known fact that teaching and learning a foreign language cannot be reduced to the direct teaching of linguistic skills like phonology, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax. The contemporary models of communicative competence show that there is much more to learning a language, and they include the vital component of cultural knowledge and awareness (Bachman 1990; Council of Europe 2001).
In other words, to learn a language well usually requires knowing something about the culture of that language. Communication that lacks appropriate cultural content often results in humorous incidents, or worse, is the source of serious miscommunication and misunderstanding. According to Kramsch (1993, 1), culture “is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them.”
Implementing the intercultural approach is a challenging, demanding task for the language teacher, who must possess at least some intercultural knowledge and very often keep developing it alongside his or her students.
What must not be overlooked is that intercultural education leads, to a certain extent, to the acceptance of values, beliefs, and behavior that may conflict with one’s own. “The language teacher, in guiding the learner to new perspectives and new identities, is tampering with fundamentals of human identity” (Gee 1988, 220). Therefore, the EFL teacher must implement the intercultural approach in a tactful, skillful, and conscious way.
Systematic intercultural training is a precondition for educating a new generation of young people who will not only tolerate, but also understand, accept, and respect people from different world cultures, will communicate with them successfully, and will learn from them through that communication. Zofia Chlopek