Abstract

One of the many concerns of EFL teacher trainers is to provide opportunities for the student teachers to not only learn the target language, but also the target culture. Today’s and future language teachers will face cross-cultural communication challenges more often than not in this ever-increasing globalised world. The immigration phenomenon in Chile had always been an issue concerning the socio-political ambit, as all the major immigrating groups came from neighbouring countries, all Spanish-speaking ones. This changed some years ago when a massive influx of Haitian immigrants started to arrive in Chile; the issue then became also sociocultural, and one of the main challenges was the communicative barrier. This brief talk will focus on a teaching experience a group of English-as-a-Foreign-Language student teachers had when teaching Spanish as a Second Language to Haitian immigrants residing in their hometown. The situation was very unique as a small group of student teachers of English tried to teach Spanish to a large group of Creole speakers of different ages. Cross-cultural communication for Chilean people in general, up to this point, was very scarce and when it did take place, it mainly faced cultural or dialectal differences as Spanish was the shared language. Cross-cultural communication for this group of people in this teaching-learning experience took a completely different meaning as they were confronted with the seemingly obvious cultural differences but also with the most overt language differences and difficulties. This experience has been replicated since 2018 when it first started on campus and has only suffered a brief halt because of the pandemic situation. Efforts are being made to resume activities in virtual mode soon.