Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Contrastive Look into Spanish Language Textbooks

Development of intercultural communicative competence, as an understanding of what culture comprises, positive attitudes toward cultural diversity, and competent use of different communicative skills, represents an integral, if not the most important part of foreign language instruction. However, different individuals bring different goals and motivations to the intercultural experience, which is strongly influenced by their dominant cultural model. Thus, depending on the cultural model to which they have been exposed during their life together with each person’s individual traits, students respond differently to the teaching of intercultural competence. On the other hand, manuals that are used in foreign language instruction equally manifest authors’ local cultural traits and specific attitudes toward the target language and culture. Consequently, it is important to consider these cultural interpretations and effect they might have on the outcomes of the foreign language instruction. In this paper we observe different interpretations of Hispanic cultures in Spanish language textbooks of different countries, more specifically, a number of selected textbooks published by major editorials from Spain, United States, and Serbia. The analysis of the corpus is organized in terms of three main categories, that is, sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and intercultural content, since these components are most directly related to the presentation and interpretation of the target language culture and intercultural competence. It is envisioned that the analysis will provide us with a clear understanding of interdependence of local cultural models and content related to the teaching of intercultural competence, which will enable some general, as well as culture specific suggestions for the elaboration of foreign language manuals and their application in the teaching of foreign languages