Developing Intercultural Competence in the Classroom by Means of Researching Concepts

Abstract

In the context of globalization, migration and outsourcing the plurilingual competence is of paramount importance. Alongside the necessity to be plurilingual for the employee there is a need to develop the ability of intercultural management competence for the heads of international companies who hire competent people all over the world. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is an international standard for describing language ability. It promotes multilingualism and plurilingualism. These two concepts refer to two different ideas in the language context. The latter refers to changing the paradigm of teaching English as the language of today’s business. The paradigm shift is becoming known as the ‘multilingual turn in education. According to King this is a new model for language (2024, cited in Cambridge Assessment English. There is a move to the practice of content and language integrated learning (CLTL). This means teaching English today by taking into consideration the first language of the student and comparing the cultural patterns that are described or expressed linguistically in both the native language and the foreign one. A typical way of studying cultural differences and similarities cross-culturally and developing intercultural competence is the research of concepts in various languages and their association with mental models. Cultural linguistics is a branch that has developed since the beginning of the 90s of the previous century. It started by combining several domains in conducting a research of concepts cross-culturally. From the linguistic point of view it was done by the Polish-Australian scholar Anna Wierzbicka (Wierzbicka, 1999) and her followers and from the cultural or anthropological point of view these were Geert Hofstede (Hofstede, 2024), E.T. Hall (Hall, 1990) and others. CZU: [005.73:316.77]:81’246.3; DOI: https://doi.org/10.53486/micg2024.01