Teaching English in a Multicultural Classroom

This paper will be concerned with multiculturalism in English language teaching as an important
component in education. Multicultural education as an idea has a major goal to reform the educational institutions in
order to find a way for all the students no matter their gender, race, ethnicity, language or cultural group to have an
equal opportunity to learn and study at school. A multicultural classroom consists of students from different cultures
which are supposed to form a diverse learning environment. In order to accomplish a relaxing environment the
teacher should possess skills, creativity and knowledge. Multicultural education as a whole process should be
infused into the school programs in order to achieve equal rights for every student. In order to accomplish that,
students should be educated in terms of intercultural communication i.e. they should learn how to respond to
different cultures and ethnicities and intercultural communication will teach them how to respect and understand the
diverse cultures. If teachers become aware that language skills and knowledge need to be connected to the
intercultural competence, students will feel that energy also and will show much better results. That is the reason
why the intercultural competence is essential in achieving goals on an international level and more precisely by
implementing intercultural competence in education a bigger cultural awareness can be attained. Approaches to
multicultural education will be discussed in details and finally some strategies for developing multicultural lessons
will be proposed.