While communicative competence (CC) still remains the ultimate objective of modern foreign-language curricula, globalization and intercultural situations teachers and students now confront daily demand a new goal of foreign language (FL) teaching: the development of intercultural communicative competence. Its foundation are attitudes that are pivotal to learners’ perception and acceptance of real world; however, these underlying beliefs and values are precisely the most challenging element of interculturality to attain. It has recently been proven that FL teachers, and English as a foreign language (EFL) and Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) secondary school coursebooks, indeed, fail to depict values that learners can experience and observe in real life and, thus, endanger the development of critical thinking that should evolve precisely in secondary school. This Master's Thesis, then, investigates whether the inappropriate treatment of intercultural competence (IC) is as well the case in the contemporary coursebooks used in Slovenian secondary schools. In other words, the study examines the level of presence of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL and SFL coursebooks used in the first year of secondary education in Slovenia. More precisely, the thesis revolves around a comparison of the development of the three main resources of interculturality (i.e. knowledge, skills and attitudes) in EFL and SFL coursebooks, while devoting special care to the resource of attitudes. The checklist of criteria used in the analysis emanate from the FREPA's (Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures) (2012) descriptors of resources. The findings acquired in the present study are surprising but logical and in line with some other investigations in the area of interculturality. They attest to a disproportionate ratio between the three resources of IC in EFL and SFL coursebooks, that is in favour of the knowledge component. Attitudes are, however, unexpectedly, not the most neglected resource in SFL coursebooks, but remain as such in EFL coursebooks, which, might have to do with their date of publication that was prior to the launching of the FREPA (2012). Last, but most important, the share of attitudinal contents in EFL and SFL coursebooks is of almost the same minute size in both sets of coursebooks, as well as the depth of the attitudes that is in both cases on the same superficial level.
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