Aims of the project: Incorporating cultures into teaching languages has a dual effect. It raises cultural awareness and promotes language learning. There are educational skills beyond mere language teaching and at the same time it offers a rich array of interesting and highly motivating learning-resource material. In consideration of the questions - How can I motivate my students and make them speaking? How can I make them participate actively? How can I cope with mixed abilities and interests and due to steadily emerging new global issues we feel attracted to focus these contemporary challenges together with looking at cultures. Both, teachers and students should develop new points of view by allowing the materials to speak for themselves; and at the same time there is the chance to approach different learning strategies. Important as well for the teacher is a certain acquisition of insight what the students are like and what are they interested in. It appears interesting and important to me to find new things about cultures and points of view by seeing it from a more impartial perspective. With intercultural learning we can gain a better understanding of another country, its culture and its society and develop a greater curiosity about foreigners whom we meet in our places here. Moreover, we might become confident and comfortable with people from abroad and increase sensibility to problems in the world. So what do we know about cultural influences and other people’s lives? Which daily routines, traditions, homes, meals, education and law systems do they have and what are their thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears? As we live together on that planet we should take the chance to learn from each other’s differences. We want to find out similarities and differences of cultures together with my students. At the same time we could observe global structures. As there is the subject ‘Managing a Farmers’ Market’ in our school the students get in touch with advertising rural products and can develop interests in economical backgrounds. Besides home-made goods we sell fair trade products which help to bring more justice in world trade. It makes a lot of sense to be involved in a system that stabilizes the environment without exploiting or damaging anyone/anything. Another opportunity to encounter culture is contacting people from abroad. Teachers and students are going to initiate exchanges with peers from foreign countries. Maybe they become motivated and eager to interact. As side effect they might improve linguistic skills and review language; and maybe it contributes to general knowledge. If we incorporate cultural topics into the lesson planning and make them to an integral part of lessons we surely come across new challenges and notwithstanding, both teachers and students will collect valuable experiences. On the whole, we will reflect familiar and strange aspects, take advantage of a great variety of topics and make progress in language learning. Equally important we might get to know each other better and learn from vice versa besides feeling confident due to following individual abilities and interests. Getting to know people from other cultures isn’t only a matter of fact and important to cope with, it’s interesting and enriching; at all it is rewarding when we come closer to each other and develop awareness of various backgrounds. We have been collecting meaningful experiences so far and have come across opportunities to build lasting friendships. These encounters still give continual enjoyment but also steady tasks of questioning and reflecting. In general we have noticedmore benefits than conflicts: • You foster personal growth, get engaged in life long learning and gain competences based on experiences and grounded research. • You are provided with opportunities of recognition, understand different roles better and broaden the field of vision. • You can develop empathy and dedication for global justice. • Face to face experiences bring people together across boundaries. • You are enabled to diminish prejudice and detest racism. Number and profile of our students: 30 pupils in the age of 15 years, Frame of reference - level A2 Based on Cultural Awareness the participants of the project concentrate on • recognizing cultural images and symbols • working with cultural products • examining patterns of everyday life • exploring values and attitudes We make the study of intercultural topics to an integral part of the curriculum. We continue a task oriented and cooperative learning approach where the students • work together in pairs or small groups to gather information • share and discuss what they have discovered • interpret the information and compare it with the own culture • need to be trained to extract appropriate information from the material