Introduction chapter I developing intercutural competence through task-based language

CONCLUSION
Foreign languages are the richest and most powerful mediums to access new cultures given the inherent cultural load they carry. As a result, language teaching settings have been acknowledged as the most suitable environments to foster intercultural understanding. As contacts between and among different cultures keep growing and the demands for foreign language teaching and learning keep rising, there will be an increasingly high need to empower language students with the appropriate tools to deal with everyday intercultural encounters in order to ensure the well- functioning and stability of culturally diverse democracies in today’s globalized world.
Accordingly, along with the ability to use the code in linguistically effective ways, it is also crucial for foreign language users to be able to successfully communicate, understand and respect people from a variety of cultural backgrounds by challenging contemporary issues such as stereotyping, prejudice, racism or discrimination. It is for this reason that SLA faces the responsibility to equip learners with a solid intercultural competence, which has so far been neglected in the ELT classroom, to appropriately use the target language within multilingual and multicultural environments.
Hence, this project was undertaken to design a teaching proposal demonstrating how intercultural learning and foreign language acquisition can effectively be integrated together into contemporary ELT curriculum which is at the forefront of foreign language acquisition. To do so, a literature review of communicative language teaching was first carried out to contextualize these classroom practices in the present understanding of how languages are learnt and taught. Established the development of communicative competence as the key pedagogical objective of today’s language pedagogy, this construct was thoroughly described and so were its integral components with an especial emphasis on the intercultural competence drawing on the scant attention it has received.
What is more, a task-based language teaching approach was here put forward as the most suitable setting for the development of linguistically, socially and interculturally competent S/FL users building on recent evidence from a number of studies. Therefore, the design of this task seeks to not only create opportunities for language acquisition within communicatively meaningful settings but also to promote the development of those skills and attitudes, in addition to cultural knowledge, that are thought necessary to successfully take part in intercultural encounters.
Neither TBLT is the only right approach to achieve SLA and intercultural learning, nor is this proposal intended to be the panacea for the problem of establishing the optimal intercultural orientation to language learning. This is just a modest project which attempts to reflect upon the ultimate goal of language education as well as to shed some more light on the personal, communicative and sociocultural benefits of allowing some space for intercultural education in the S/FL classroom.