Language Teachers, Cultural Content and Intercultural Competence

The aim of this paper is to investigate the teacher's perception of the objectives of language teaching and the cultural contents in the curricula. It also seeks to find whether developing intercultural competence among learners is among the teacher's perceived language teaching objectives and the extent to which their classroom practices reflect that objective. The findings have shown that most of the informants were linguistically oriented and that their primary objective of teaching English is to enable students to acquire communicative competence. They perceive teaching culture in terms of knowledge transfer and they favor teacher-centred mode of teaching to student-centred. Interestingly, most of the informants expressed their willingness to interculturalize their teaching although their classroom practices do not reflect intercultural competence teaching.