The paper focuses on the inter-cultural dimension of language teacher education. Cross-cultural problems are central to language teaching problems and teachers must be inspired to co-operate in the globalizing world of 21st century, which was the motive for Willems to write the analysis of language policies; the importance of context in language teaching, and teacher education. The paper is a practical source of reference, too in that it provides the reader with classroom applications in which cultural gaps are intended to be filled with tasks that agree with the principles of the Council of Europe. Throughout the paper the cultural issues that are at the heart of language classroom are dealt with, with an intention to suggest solutions, which I very much enjoyed since most research just portray problems, and ask for further research in the area. The writer suggests a ‘collective creativity’ in designing cultural exchange tasks, and refers to the significance of tolerance to enable world piece, so, in fact, language teachers seem to bear a critical role in enabling the context to address this tolerance. Actually, in his conclusion, Willems does give this responsibility to language teachers. I find that the fundamental value assigned to language teachers is a realistic one, and I, myself, very eagerly have accepted to enable a context in my mixed group classrooms to be more ‘accepting’ when it comes to cultural differences.
Another issue raised in the article is the difficulty language barriers cause especially in the European parliament, during the translations the meaning might be lost and parliamenters may end up voting for the ideas they oppose to. This to me was very intriguing since I thought only professional translators worked in the European parliament, and the language barrier was not one which caused misunderstandings.
The summary of what to focus on when training teachers was very effectively compact: ‘knowledge of the other cultures, an insight into them and a readiness to open up’.
I disagree with two points raised in the article, one being culture’s unchangeable, fixed. I had never thought of ‘culture’ as a coded program, on the contrary, to me ‘culture’ is a constantly changing phenomenon even in individual level.
The second point I couldn’t agree with was the outdated communication means mentioned in the article. It is possible to use the emerging technologies in language teacher education too, to develop their culture insights and exchanges. The article even referred to snail-mail among the tasks suggested!
PS. The fact that cultural research was conducted by a global information technology company makes one think of the limits economic benefits play on social sciences. Probably IBM needed a more culturally integrated and open understanding among its international employees and that’s why they conducted the research.