engleski

Fostering Cross-cultural communicative competence in business English classes through literary short stories

The paper presents the methodology and results of a study carried out in an advanced Business English (BE) course at the Faculty of Economics, University of Split, Croatia. The study proposes the inclusion of literary short stories as a means to develop students’ cross-cultural communicative competence through the implementation of two constructivist approaches, the Inquiry-based approach and the Transactional approach. The aim of the study was to find answers to the following research questions: (1) what are the students’ perceptions of the cross-cultural issues in BE with respect to the study of literary texts ; (2) can the selected constructivist approaches to literary texts engage students in the negotiation of meaning while developing their positive attitude towards cross-cultural tolerance ; (3) what is the students’ perception of the relationship between the constructivist approach to studying literary texts as a means to enhance cross-cultural communicative competence and the perceived effects of the approach. The results of the study reveal a positive correlation between the implementation of constructivist approaches to short literary texts and the students’ increased ability to analyse cultural content embedded in the texts as well as to question cultural stereotypes.

Business English; cross-cultural communicative competence; literary short stories; constructivist model; inquiry-based approach; transactional approach.

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