Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence with a Textbook

Although intercultural concepts tend to essentialism and reductionism and thus run the risk of constructing artificial ethnic differences and stereotypes, the existing models are quite useful for teaching purposes as well as for the purpose of this paper which is to analyze a textbook for German high school in order to find out more about its potential to help develop ICC. In my view, using both terms interchangeably is acceptable as long as one considers culture to be a dynamic, negotiable phenomenon (cf. Freitag 2008). Regarding the actual teaching I agree with Hu (2009) that intercultural concepts in spite of their deficits cannot and should not be replaced immediately, but gradually with the narrative-constructive concepts of intercultural learning in mind. Landeskunde should be taught as well, but not only to impart fact knowledge, but to enable students to communicate in real intercultural situations. Generally speaking, the task of a teacher is to prepare his students for the challenges of future life and they are definitely going to take place in a globalized, inter- or transcultural world.