Contextualising Culture in Teaching a Foreign Language: the Cultural Element among Cultural Awareness, Cultural Competency and Cultural Literacy

The basic aim of this article is to establish the place the cultural element holds within the triad cultural awareness, cultural competence and cultural literacy, on the background of a multinational class in which a foreign language is taught and its momentum in the teaching process, but only after clearly delineating the core features of each concept, as well as their logical sequentiality. Founding the research on a corpus of answers collected from candidates to learning Romanian as a foreign language regarding their reasons and motivation to approach its study, and considering a whole body of examples gathered as a result of our first-hand experience in teaching Romanian as a foreign language, the paper also discusses the connection between society, language and culture. But, most importantly, this study puts forward the concept of culturacy, a term originally coined from cultural literacy, as the fifth and compulsory element to be included in the set of skills of foreign language learning. The limitations are, for the moment, connected to the approach culturacy can have in assessment, but the forthcoming paper, focused on establishing a solid profile of the cultural element in teaching a foreign language, has already considered this aspect.