Culturally anchored lexical units in modern foreign language teaching

Abstract

The question of interculturality and the plurilingual and pluricultural competence connected with it is often found at the heart of contemporary language learning debate. The documents drafted by the Council of Europe seem to reflect this fact. Nowadays, language teachers face the challenge of designing a lesson unit which not only contains and practises all aspects of the language but also develops all skills and competences through the process of so-called integrated learning. Language teaching and learning is coupled with cultural and linguistic anthropology which is often termed as anthropological approach in language teaching. The approach calls on the term: cultureme which denotes language items present in any language class material whose cultural embedding requires a more extensive semantic and pragmatic commentary. The methods, means and techniques employed within the eclectic teaching framework aim to eliminate a learner’s ethnocentric attitude and existing stereotypes which leads to the development of the plurilingual and pluricultural competence. Our research relies on our extensive experience acquired in the plurilingual and multicultural environment of 30 nationalities and 160 students of the College of Europe in Natolin while teaching Romance (French, Spanish, Italian) and Slavonic languages (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian).