ACCULTURATION HYPOTHESIS

Schumman holds there is a relationship between the social and psychological distances from the target language and the amount of acquisition from the learner; this is to say, the more degree of interaction and comfortable relationship with the language that the learner experience, the more the student acquire the target language.

Acculturation is the action generated from the learner when it is integrated with the target language. At this point when talking about acculturation, we could think about the worth study of the meaning of Intercultural Communicative Competence. 

For us as future teachers, culture must be an important issue when teaching a foreign language, but we have to be careful when administrating these kinds of information or competence to our students. Related to this topic about the necessary skills for an effective intercultural and cross-cultural management,  “Gudykunst, proposes “the need for a sense of a common shared world” The qualities of the “competent communicator“, which he identifies , are the psychological preconditions  for satisfying this need, but a common shared world has to be created in interaction with other people. It is not simply there, wanting to be discovered and accessed”³

It is essential for the teacher to have a clear concept about these terms because they will help her/him to distinguish which kind of competence is necessary for the students. As Gudykunst proposed, we need to be conscious that all of us are part of the same world; for that reason, we are a social group where all the people need to accept others and at the same time, be accepted by them.

Socialization is a process in which we accept and respect differences in behaviors, beliefs and meanings from different groups. Those differences are presented when negotiating meaning; by the time that the learner has a contact with one integrant from a different culture, he has to respect the other beliefs without forgetting his/her own costumes.

“FLT should not attempt to provide representations of other cultures, but should concentrate on equipping learners with the means of accessing and analyzing any cultural practices and meanings they encounter” ⁴. The Role of students must not be one of imitators of foreigners, but social actors in interaction.

^3. Page 17. Intercultural Communicative Competence. Mychael Byram.

Posted by: Jessica B. Liberato