CULTURAL COMPETENCE, A CONDITION FOR SECOND-LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

The present paper, based on the author’s experience of teaching English to students of economics, sets out to verify the conclusions reached by linguistic anthropologists over the last decades about the relationship between linguistic and cultural competence. It identifies the main cultural characteristics of the UK and the US, as well as their various linguistic consequences, in an attempt to demonstrate that developing the four traditional language skills is not quite enough for effective intercultural communication in English, and that the one element that should be implicit to language learning is culture, or the culture-specific way of using language.