Intercultural Learning: Raising Cultural Awareness
This article offers an introduction to the international field of culture pedagogy in foreign language teaching and learning with special reference to the years since 2000. After a short presentation of the multidisciplinary nature of the field and an overview of its diverse development until 2000, the article focuses on a number of contemporary trends: The increasing importance of postmodernism and its emphasis on the individual learner and his/her learning processes and intercultural competence; the development of cultural approaches to literature pedagogy working with the interplay of cultural perspectives; ethnographic approaches to intercultural learning that enable learners to create their own insights into local cultural complexities; ideas of critical citizenship that emphasize the importance of reflection, wondering, criticism and hope as a part of language and culture learning; the idea of culture in language (languaculture) and transnational perspectives on language and culture learning, which foreground the transnational flows of languages across cultural contexts, and hence suggest a more global approach to language and culture learning and the raising of (multi)cultural awareness.