Zur Förderung interkultureller Aufmerksamkeit im Fremdsprachen-Frühbeginn

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to show the need to develop intercultural awareness at the early stages of foreign language teaching. In the first place, the paper discusses the concepts of intercultural competence and awareness, indicating the complexity of these phenomena, and then, it presents the analysis of the intercultural content and tasks aiming at developing intercultural awareness, which are included in the leading Polish textbooks for teaching German as a foreign language to children. Since the intercultural content seems either insufficient or it lacks diversity as the findings reveal, the next part of the paper suggests some activities that could be incorporated in the coursebooks to enrich their intercultural content and overcome the problems of intercultural deficiency. Special attention is paid to the Polish version of the European Language Portfolio for children, which plays a crucial role in raising young learners’ intercultural sensitivity. It also constitutes an interesting additional material that could be used together with the coursebook content in language education of children.