Intercultural competence and foreign language learning in the primary school

The purpose of this chapter is to argue for and explain the need to ensure that language learning in the primary school has a ‘cultural dimension’, which is to say that a foreign language is not just learnt as an encoding of children’s first language but as a language in its own right embodying other cultural beliefs, behaviours and meanings. This ‘cultural dimension’ has been variously called ‘cultural awareness’, ‘cultural studies’ and in France and Germany civilisation and Landeskunde, respectively. Here we shall refer to ‘intercultural competence’ as the key concept.