Role Play: A Practical Way to Teach Intercultural Communication

In an increasingly global and mobile society, we are faced with greater cultural diversity both in our professional and private lives. As a result of this, more and more emphasis is being placed on the need for intercultural awareness, adaptation and respect for cultural differences. This is reflected in the updated (2013) Higher Education (HE) curriculum for the two- year Business Administration and Management program in France, which now includes an intercultural communicative language teaching strand for Business English (BE) classes. For English language teachers, the real challenge is to find a meaningful and entertaining way to sensitize learners to the complexities of this topic, while assisting them in the development of their professional English and metacognitiveskills. This teaching note investigates the implementation and results of pedagogical method which involves a group of first year business students for a professional peer collaborative role-play activity by means of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach.