Málfríður - 15.03.2010, Blaðsíða 24

This article came up as a result after all the discus-
sions and debate generated among students during
the course (Methodology of Spanish as a foreign
Language) taught at the University of Iceland in
February 2010.
The Intercultural Communication
“Cross-cultural communication and negotiation
skills are all about being able to deal with people
from other cultures, people with a visibly different
set of values, norms, traditions, and beliefs than
those of one’s own. Usually, the greater the distance
between counterparts cultures, the greater the cul-
ture risk is, and therefore, so is the chance for cross-
cultural misunderstandings triggered by miscom-
munication.” (Vlaiman, V. 2010)
A language cannot be studied without taking
the context into account. This is a statement which
seems very clear today, but still according to some
didactic material and some pedagogic perspective,
culture was seen as an accessory to the learning
process; accordingly, the didactic material designed
was very far from the reality of the target language,
kind of “fake” and gave the students a completely
stereotyped vision of the reality.
We must take into account that language and cul-
ture are inseparable because language is the main
representation of cultural identity and we learn a
language through its cultural manifestations.
According to the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages, language students will have
to be evaluated not just regarding their language
skills but also to their intercultural competence of the
language they are learning. We must prepare them
to the current socio-political situation where mobil-
ity and international cooperation have become eve-
ryday issues. The better we prepare them the bigger
success they will have in their approach to the new
language and culture.
We are no longer just language teachers, our role
in the classroom is that of “cultural mediators” and
part of it will be to guide our students to reflect on
the similarities and the differences with their own
culture, going beyond the stereotypes. We will make
them be conscious about how the society they come
from works in order to compare it with the one they
are learning about. And we will teach them to under-
stand, to accept and to respect those differences until
they reach a balance between three parts: Knowledge
(about other cultures, people, nations, behaviors…);
Empathy (understanding feelings and needs of other
people) and Self-confidence (knowing what I want,
my strengths and weaknesses, emotional stability).
It is very important to understand that being
fluent in a language does not mean to know all
the grammar rules and use them properly or being
able to write a text without any spelling mistakes,
it also means that we want to be perfectly under-
stood in every context. To achieve that goal, we
must know the sociocultural context of the target
language in order to apply the right strategies to
24 MÁLFRÍÐUR
Interculturality in the Language Classroom:
Teaching Spanish in Iceland
Pilar Concheiro Lourdes Pérez Mateos
Pilar Concheiro is Adjunct teacher of Business Span-
ish at the University of Reykjavík and also collabo-
rates with the University of Iceland as a teacher in
the MA- studies in Spanish Teaching. She has been
a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language for more
than 10 years in different Universities in Spain and
abroad. She is also a teacher trainer and has col-
laborated with Instituto Cervantes. Currently she is
doing her PhD. research about applying new tech-
nologies to the teaching and learning of Spanish.
Lourdes Pérez Mateos, B.A in Philology, has long
worked in the teaching of foreign languages and in
tourism in Spain and abroad. At present she is the
head of the department of Spanish at Móðurmál,
the Association of the teaching of second native lan-
guages for bilingual children in Iceland,where she
has taught since 2007.