The Relevance of an Intercultural Approach in Teaching English for Academic Purposes.

The Relevance of an Intercultural Approach in Teaching English for Academic Purposes. Transnational education is one of the many facets of inclusive education, with its relevance of English as the natural Lingua Franca in a vast range of contexts. The University of Catania, Italy, is an interesting case-study of a highly international University, which welcomes students from all over the world, such as Erasmus and visiting students, and where transnational education has become an ordinary practice. In the light of my experience of English language teaching within the Department of Educational Science, I would like to report both on the cognitive value of an intercultural, learner-centered approach (as opposed to the well-known language-centered approach (Ibba, 2007) and on the various factors that concur to make mixed classes a motivating practice. Based on Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which states that “people who speak different languages have different worldviews”, my teaching proposal aims at fulfilling three objectives: - Understanding the perspectives of other cultures; - Comparing the language and culture of others with students’ own - Using the English language outside the University setting. Within a transnational education project, the teacher’s role is that of a cultural mediator (David Katan 1999) who takes students’ needs (not only linguistic, but also the academic ones) into account (Swales 2003: 150-164) and practices scaffolding (Vygotsky 1980) as a guidance on the development of cognitive and social skills. Moreover, the practice of translation as a classroom activity in an English language course (Popovic, 2009) makes students feel they are acting as real cultural mediators, actually bridging the gap between members of different socio-cultural backgrounds that do not share the same knowledge. At the same time, it provides students with ample scope for exploring the similarities and differences between languages and cultures, and sensitises them to the compensatory strategies that need to be activated to achieve pragmatic equivalence and cross-cultural understanding. Finally, some excellent sources to help teachers connect culture with the English language teaching process will be presented.