Resumen de Practical Proposals for the Development of Intercultural Communicative Competence in EFL: What Textbooks won’t Tell you
Isabel Alonso Belmonte, María Fernández-Agüero
The objective of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, we aim at endowing teachers and teacher trainers with grounded theory on the concept of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and its development in the foreign language class. In that respect, this is a practical contribution to the improvement of teachers’ critical skills to test the intercultural potential of textbooks and teaching materials, where the findings highlighted in the literature review are illustrated by means of a case study based on a recent English language textbook series commonly used in our teaching context. On the other hand, we present examples of well-tested productive skills-building activities (speaking, writing, interaction, mediation) that prepare EFL students for real intercultural encounters. These suggestions are intended to compensate some of the limitations and weaknesses reported in research on ICC in internationally oriented ELT textbooks.
