LA INTERCULTURALIDAD EN LA ASIGNATURA DE INGLÉS DE LA E.S.O. BILINGÜE EN SEVILLA, ESPAÑA

Abstract

The teaching of a language cannot be separated from the teaching of its culture(s) due to the fact that, as Grève and Van Passel (1971: 173) point out, "the language essentially represents one of the main aspects of the culture of a community" and "the mastery of a language implies the knowledge of the language's social usage and its functioning in everyday communicative situations" (Gimeno Menéndez, 1997: 297). However, the attempts to make the students reach appropriate cultural knowledge to function in interactions with speakers of another language and culture or, expressed through a more recent terminology, to acquire an intercultural interactive competence for the purpose are not showing the expected results because of the treatment culture receives in terms of quantity, quality and importance; the objective of this article is to summarize a specific aspect of a recent research related to the implementation and use of language assistants in the English as a foreign language classroom of Spanish/ English bilingual schools of Seville. Apart from showing the results of this research regarding the treatment of culture, these results will be compared with those of other previous studies that highlight shortcomings and offer advice and recommendations for improvement in order to validate, reinforce and insist on the implementation of these and other suggestions.