Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 

About: Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): German & Foreign language. It has an ISSN identifier of 1205-6545. Over the lifetime, 618 publications have been published receiving 2778 citations.

The Cultural Component of Language Teaching

Abstract: Despite the advances made by research in the spheres of the intercultural and the multicultural, language teaching is still operating on a relatively narrow conception of both language and culture. Language continues to be taught as a fixed system of formal structures and universal speech functions, a neutral conduit for the transmission of cultural knowledge. Culture is incorporated only to the extent that it reinforces and enriches, not that it puts in question, traditional boundaries of self and other. In practice, teachers teach language and culture, or culture in language, but not language as culture. The theoretical framework I propose here for teaching culture through language suspends the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular in language teaching. It embraces the particular, not to be consumed by it, but as a platform for dialogue and as a common struggle to realign differences.

The Metaphor TIME AS SPACE across Languages

Abstract: 1 The domains of space and time The impact of spatial orientation on human thought and, in particular, our understanding of time has often been noted. 1 Lakoff (1993: 218) assumes that our metaphorical understanding of time in terms of space is biologically determined: \" In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion. \" This explanation is not fully convincing because there is empirical evidence that humans directly perceive and \" feel \" the passage of time (see Evans, in print). Our direct experience of time is subjective and may, therefore, be strikingly different from objective time. Thus, a given duration of time is experienced as lasting longer or shorter depending on our state of awareness and the amount of information registered. For example, the duration of time in situations of heightened awareness and high information processing such as during times of suffering or danger is experienced as passing more slowly, while in situations of low information processing, such as during routine activities, time appears to pass more quickly. Evans convincingly argues that our experience of time results from internal, subjective responses to external sensory stimuli and that by imparting spatio-physical \" image content \" to a subjective response concept we are able to \" objectify \" our temporal experience. According to this view of time, our spatial understanding of time is not determined by biological needs, but by intersubjective, or communicative, needs. We need spatio-physical metaphors to speak about time in the same way that we need concrete metaphors to speak about other internal states such as emotions or thoughts. We may, however, consider a third reason why the metaphor TIME AS SPACE is so pervasive. In Metaphors We Live by, Lakoff and Johnson (1980: Ch. 21) draw attention to the power of metaphor to create new meaning. Our veridical experience of time is restricted to only a few of its aspects: simultaneity and duration, and the awareness of the present as the time experienced at each moment, the past as the time related to remembered events, and the future as time related to predicted events. In metaphorizing time as space, these notions are typically seen with respect to a one-dimensional line, the time axis. But …

The interaction of linguistic and motivational variables in second language task performance

Abstract: In this study we investigated the role of motivation and some other related individual difference variables such as anxiety and willingness to communicate on the quality (accuracy, complexity, lexical richness, the number of arguments and counter-arguments) and quantity of students' output. We computed correlations between motivational and language variables in the whole sample as well as in two sub-groups of the participants: those who had favourable attitude to the task they had to perform and those who did not. The effect of the partner's motivation was also assessed. The results suggest that it is rather the quantity of talk that is influenced by motivation and not the quality of the content produced. In the whole sample it was only course attitudes that had a beneficial effect on the accuracy of the participants' output. When the sample was divided into High and Low task-attitude students, we found that even if students did not like the specific task they had to perform, their accuracy increased if they had a generally positive attitude to the language course itself. It was also revealed that if students’ attitude to the task was negative, their own motivation had little effect on the quality and quantity of language output, instead it was the partner’s motivation that played a role in the performance of the task. If on the other hand, the learners had positive attitudes to the task, it was primarily their own motivation that influenced their performance and not that of the interlocutor.

Interkulturelle Kompetenz - Zustand und Zukunft eines umstrittenen Konzepts

Abstract: Der Artikel beschreibt den Forschungsstand zum Konzept Interkulturelle Kompetenz anhand der Darstellung und Bewertung des Spektrums unterschiedlicher Definitionsansatze in der deutschsprachigen Debatte. Hierzu wird exemplarisch die Dis- kussion um einen Uberblicksartikel zum Thema interkulturelle Kompetenz des Psycholo- gen Alexander Thomas untersucht, der in mehr als dreisig Stellungnahmen von Wissen- schaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen kommentiert wurde. Auf Basis dieser Zustandsanalyse werden Anforderungen an ein zeitgemases Verstandnis interkultureller Kompetenz abgeleitet und Vorschlage fur eine mogliche Weiterentwicklung des Konzepts auf der Grundlage eines kohasionsorientierten Kultur- verstandnisses entwickelt.