The Intercultural Speaker

THE INTERCULTURAL SPEAKER
By: Ana María Ramírez Antivar
Teaching English and a new language in general has been more meaningful over the time. The truth is that teachers do not know yet how to dothis experience as reflective as is expected, because maybe they are not conscious of all the implications of introducing students, not only in a new grammatical structure, but in an unknown culture:this is what we call an intercultural speaker.
Both Kramsch and Jaeger emphasize in what it is to be an intercultural speaker and what are the characteristics of the good learner and user of alanguage. In first place, Kramsch attests the concept of native speaker. She says a native speaker is someone who acquires full communicative competence in a language, for he/she was raised in suchenvironment, besides, this individual is accepted (as a native speaker) by the society where he/she lives. Kramsch discusses the privileges of being a native speaker and the fact of being born (or be for along term) in a specific socio-cultural space, gives advantages to develop a language according to the rules (grammatical, phonetic, syntactic, semantic) and the constant pragmatic changes in it.English learning always aims to the ideal that it is meant to be learnt as the native a speaker does, which is respectable, but it is crucial to introduce ourselves in the culture of the language we arelearning, for there is a community, a whole history and cultural background we are dealing with (indirectly). As Jaeger says, the learner has to be considered as a mediator between different cultures,and with his/her knowledge he must understand the cultural and social universe the other lives in. Here is where Jaeger and Kramsch coincide: The intercultural speaker should be able to accept,differentiate, associate and respect each culture as equal. Additionally, Jaeger makes a precise definition of what is an intercultural speaker (different from Kramsch), she defines he or she “as a...