engleski

Fostering cross-cultural communicative competence in Business English classes through literary short stories

Globalization and intercultural communication are two of the most important phenomena that characterize the contemporary labour market. Concepts like multiculturality, multiliteracy, and intercultural/cross-cultural education have entered the LSP arena requiring teachers to increasingly focus their attention to developing learners´ cross-cultural communicative competencies. Those entail the possession of a broad set of attitudes, knowledge and skills which should accompany linguistic, socio-linguistic and discourse competence. Departing from the notion that there is a strong need for developing techniques for raising LSP learners´ intercultural communicative competence for today´s global environment, the paper proposes two constructivist approaches (the Inquiry-based approach and the Transactional approach) to authentic literary short stories as a means to engage business English learners in the activities such as negotiation of meaning, interpreting, relating, and developing attitudes towards increasing cross-cultural tolerance. The study was carried out in two advanced, third-year business English classes over a period of two semesters. The results of the study showed that the approach increased the learners´ awareness of diverse cross-cultural issues raised by the analysed texts, developed their ability to discuss content related to the issue, enhanced critical thinking and raised the learners´ ability to explore cultural stereotypes and to challenge assumptions about other cultures.

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

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