The way L2 teaching process contributes to developing empathy towards the ‘other’ culture

This short essay will offer some insights on how teaching a L2 language can encourage a feeling of 'open-mindedness' towards the culture of the target language. The process of teaching a foreign language always implies a sort of intermingled cultural-linguistic approach; further than being exclusively a way of acquiring new vocabulary, syntactic, grammatical and phonological structures, it implies paralinguistic and non verbal features too; let's think about gesture, intonation, body language, traditions and believes, all elements that refer to more pragmatic aspects of the studied language, within the more general concept of culture [Balboni, 2003]. As Byram, Morgan et al. state "knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or rather cultural competence]" [Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4]. Language is then the tool through which people represent themselves and the word around them; when we learn a new language, we learn the culture supporting it as well.