Developing Intercultural Competence in Romanian Language Courses for International Students.

After 1989, Romania was faced with the challenge of integrating increasing numbers of foreigners who arrived in the country to work or study, in other words, to live for shorter or longer periods of time. Without any colonial past and deprived of contacts with the world abroad for many decades, the post-communist Romanian society has had to acquire the necessary skills to handle interaction with people of diverse cultural, historical, linguistic or religious backgrounds. The social need to efficiently communicate and work with foreigners rapidly became more stringent in the higher education system, as a result of international academic mobility. Starting from the assumptions that culture and language are closely linked, and developing intercultural communicative competence is an educational goal in itself, the aim of this paper is to address certain cultural aspects that are involved in the process of teaching and learning a foreign language. It briefly reviews the literature on the topic, and focuses on practical suggestions that teachers can make use of in the multicultural classroom of Romanian as a foreign language. The presentation leads to the conclusion that the acquisition of intercultural competence is an on-going process that will continue long after the language course has been completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]