Moving Beyond Essentialism: Cultivating EFL Learners’ Intercultural Communicative Competence through a Non-Essentialist Paradigm of Culture

Abstract

The pace of change in today’s globalized world is unprecedented. Boundaries between nations and cultures are increasingly blurred. This change requires resilient and adaptable individuals with a heightened awareness of global dynamics. Thus, foreign language education has shifted attention from traditional pedagogies promoting linguistic competence to pedagogies training learners to be intercultural competent communicators. Nonetheless, there is a hot debate on which paradigm of culture to adopt when cultivating EFL learners’ intercultural competence: the essentialist or non-essentialist paradigm. This paper is then an attempt to explore the suitable cultural paradigm for promoting intercultural communicative competence in EFL settings. Consequently, it is found that an intercultural pedagogy demands a non-essentialist paradigm which views culture as a dynamic, complex, and fluid entity, unlike the essentialist view which delimits culture to its national boundaries causing national banalism, stereotypes, and generalizations.