HENB01403U English - Elective 3, topic 3: Cross-cultural communication and foreign language learning and teaching

This course explores cross-cultural norms for communicative behaviour from a foreign language learning perspective: rules governing how to engage in conversation and how to express different speech acts in a polite and appropriate manner. All these conventions of communication differ across cultures and social groups and acquiring pragmatic competence to deal with communicative needs is a difficult and often frustrating task for the foreign language learner. During the course we will look at research on cross-cultural communication across different language groups and discuss developmental studies of pragmatic competence and the transferability of pragmatic skills across languages. A number of theoretical and pedagogical issues related to teaching cross-cultural norms and different proposal for a classroom methodology will be discussed.