Towards the Introduction of Metacultural Competence to English Language Teaching in Iran: Time for a Change!

With the expansion of contact among people from different cultural backgrounds who use English as an International Language (EIL), English has become subject to localization by a variety of communities around the globe. However, the connection of English language to a certain culture and ideology has posed a threat to other languages and cultures. In this regard, English Language Teaching (ELT) can reinforce this menace to learners nationalism by providing native speaker communicative competence and culture as the target in language education. This paper aims to introduce metacultural competence (Sharifian, 2013), as an alternative for native speaker competency, to ELT curriculum in order to enable learners negotiate their local cultural schemas, cultural metaphors, and cultural categories collectively referred to as cultural conceptualizations.More specifically, the paper suggests a change in ELT curriculum in Iran to provide chances for EFL learners to focus on conceptual variation awareness, conceptual explication strategies, and conceptual negotiation strategies in order to nullify the threat of losing and/or weakening Iranian cultural conceptualizations as a result of learning English. It is argued in this paper that Iranian EFL learners should not only be presented with different unique cultural conceptualizations from multiple varieties of English, but also they should be supplied with natural opportunities in order to appreciate and negotiate their own Iranian cultural conceptualizations in intercultural communication using English.

Keywords:

metacultural competence , cultural conceptualizations , EIL , ELT curriculum