The Cultural Component of Selected LSP Textbooks in the Area of Business and Their Potential for Developing Intercultural Competence

The article aims to investigate the cultural component of selected LSP textbooks in Business English, German, French and Spanish from the point of view of their potential for developing intercultural competence, which is indispensable in business communication (Stegu, 2017). The study analyses the cultural content of twenty textbooks as well as activities aimed at developing and practising intercultural skills. As the results show, they include different cultural information and focus on developing different skills. Moreover, they mostly present such information implicitly rather than explicitly, for example, model business letters show how business correspondence is written in the target language culture, without making explicit statements on politeness in that culture. It is thus the teacher’s role to select the textbooks, draw the learners’ attention to the cultural elements, and to supplement the books with other materials.