INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the increased mobility – with a growing tendency of people travelling, working and studying abroad, and the democratisation of the Internet particularly visible on social media – has resulted in greater intercultural encounters. What is more, the massive exodus of people from the Middle East towards Europe confronted its citizens with humanitarian, cultural, ideological and logistic problems and raised a number of questions including the question of one's identity. Even though globalisation has become a fact, Shaules observantly states that “the intercultural contact we have in our ‘global village’ doesn't amount to us having ‘intercultural experiences’” (2007: 1). In view of these developments, it seems necessary to provide university students with meaningful intercultural education and to equip them with a set of useful skills that would allow them to not only approach cultural difference but also give them a chance to experience it.

This paper will emphasise the importance of critical cultural awareness (CCA), a key ingredient of Byram's (1997) model of Intercultural Competence, which embraces a set of abilities that may help in dealing with intercultural misunderstandings, in particular those resulting from ethnocentric and stereotypical generalisations (Czajkowska-Prokop 2010). Also, an empirical research project (still in progress) aiming at finding a way to estimate the student's CCA and investigating the process of CCA raising will be briefly presented and discussed, with a focus on the practical implementation of CCA into the L2 educational context.

CRITICAL CULTURAL AWARENESS AS A CRUCIAL COMPONENT OF INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

The concept of intercultural competence, understood as “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one's intercultural knowledge, skills and attitudes” (Deardorff 2006: 247–248), has established its position in the second language teaching in multicultural societies. Spitzberg and Changnon (2009) offer an exhaustive review of numerous models which conceptualise the idea of intercultural competence.

One of the models that has gained considerable popularity in L2 education is Byram's model of Intercultural Competence (1997), presented in Figure 1. The model consists of five interrelated elements, i.e., (a) intercultural knowledge, (b) skills of interpreting and relating, (c) skills of discovery and interaction, (d) attitudes, and (e) critical cultural awareness.