Lexiculturemes, harbingers of spring: with one eye in the textbooks of Romanian as a Foreign Language and with another in the Romanian cultural space

Abstract

In an era of globalization, “knowing how to speak a foreign language” is constantly acquiring new meanings. Thus, grammatical accuracy, once so coveted, and mastery of a rich vocabulary in a foreign language (a non-native/a secondary/a desirable language to be acquired), seem to be insufficient today in the absence of minimal sociocultural knowledge. In this paper, we aimed, therefore, to investigate how the approach to culture is reflected in several Romanian as a Foreign Language textbooks published at the beginning of the current century, respectively, to what extent the selected contents correspond to the everyday needs of the learner immersed in the Romanian cultural space. Browsing through them, a first obvious conclusion was that not only the teacher and the learner play the role of mediator, but also the vocabulary can mediate access to culture.