Estrategias de enseñanza para el desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa intercultural en contextos de segunda lengua: un estudio de caso descriptivo en la mayor de las lenguas modernas de la pontificia universidad javeriana.

The following research corresponds to a descriptive case study derived from the doctoral research carried out by Carlos Rico Troncoso in 2011. This research aims at describing the teaching strategies used by the English language teachers in the Major of Modern Languages at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana when developing the students intercultural communicative competence- ICC. The concept of ICC is not new as it looks like. Social sciences and other basic disciplines have used this concept to mean how people can negotiate each other no matter the differences in people's social and cultural background. In the field of foreign language teaching, this concept has not been explored in depth (Bryram, 1989, Byram, M. et al 2001; Sercu, L. et al 2005, and Lázár, I. 2007). The informed way of dealing with the ICC in the classroom has been by means of having a look at the materials teachers used when teaching foreign languages. Most language materials, and particularly coursebooks used in classrooms, send out erratic messages about language, communication and culture. For instance, materials suggest that learning a language is linked to learning sets of grammatical structures or lists of words, or the memorizing of useful expressions for day-to-day communication. Sometimes it is associated with the idea of developing the four communicative skills. With regard to communication, they also assume that being a good communicator means being good at exchanging of information. Regarding culture, some coursebooks correlate that with the ability to acquire information about facts and events or the ability to recognize cultural products (artefacts). In the worst scenarios, cultures are neglected altogether or reduced to tourist brochure images. In terms of culture, some language coursebooks focus solely on one culture, the foreign. They overlook the culture of learners and impose implicitly the one which is represented by the language learnt. As said before, this situation becomes a problem in multicultural classrooms, where students have to develop some skills that allow them to negotiate meaning with the others of different cultural backgrounds. Students need to develop skills that enable them to mediate between their own and the other's culture. Nevertheless, these abilities are not developed by the language course books used in classrooms. Therefore we need to know what teachers do within the classroom to promote the students' intercultural communicative competence. This is the question that stimulates the inquiry process of this research.