(Inter) cultural aspects in the analysis of activities of an English textbook´s analyses linked with the purpose of changes

Abstract

The importance and the inclusion of cultural aspects in English teaching and learning as a foreign language have been receiving more attention of researches from Applied Linguistic. This is justifiable to the extent that language teaching and learning should not be detached from cultural aspects. This way, in this article, we start with the development of Communicative Approach
supported by the concept of communicative competence and we consider the competences division proposed by Canale (1983, apud VIANA, 2003). After that, we focalize the sociolinguistic competence. This competence influenced teaching and learning of a foreign language by considering that students, beyond grammatical knowledge, have to develop the ability to use the language appropriately in social and cultural ways, too. Therefore, the teacher has to help students in an intercultural process in classroom (BARBOSA, 2007; BYRAM; GRIBKOVA; STARKEY, 2002; VIANA, 2003). So that, we investigated a unit into an English textbook, used in idioms course, which proposes intercultural activities. After the analyses of those activities we notice that the activities called themselves intercultural, but they do not support the intercultural dimension. Therefore, we propose some changes in these activities in order to approach the intercultural dimension.