WHAT IF ... 

your learners/trainees need  English for communicating e.g. with French business partners / West-African customers with L2 French / Belgian visitors in the context of a sports event … etc.  ?

Knowing how to master small talk, make arrangements, ask about conditions, welcome new partners etc. will be helpful in every context and should be trained together with relevant vocabulary, grammatical features like tenses, if-sentences etc. But most importantly, these meetings involve people, who use English as their shared means of communication. British-American discourse conventions alone might not always be appropriate or even lead to irritation. For communication to be successful it might be essential to include a set of additional skills in your training such as: 

• "Can help develop a shared communication culture, by exchanging information in a simple way about values and attitudes to language and culture." (B1) • "Can, when collaborating with people from other cultures, adapt the way they work in order to create shared procedures." (B2)                         CLICK  to download the full CEFR scale.

Concepts of 'culture' may be fuzzy. 

We therefore suggest including two supplementary notions of culture in your training and engage learners in working with them: 

First-Order and Second-Order of Culture. 

What do we need to know about “French” business culture(s)? What sources of information may be reliable? Which information could be relevant for our contexts?	Tried and tested methods in teaching this have been used for a long time, e.g. ask learners to prepare a short presentation on a target country or culture of their own choice, focusing on relevant information such as discourse conventions (politeness, small talk, turn-taking etc.), body language, taboos, dress-codes, gift-giving and many more.
The world is complex, and no one can be familiar with all cultural characteristics in diverse contexts. In teaching and training, it is important therefore to use selected contextualised examples to raise awareness among learners that virtually NOTHING IS NORMAL WORLDWIDE!

Remember:  We never meet 'a culture'.  Instead, we meet individuals or groups of individuals who may or may not correspond to the stereotypical expectations we associate with their national and cultural backgrounds.	So, while it is important to be aware of cultural differences we might encounter, we should be prepared, more than anything else, to actively “facilitate pluricultural space” in specific contexts. Useful descriptors are provided by the CEFR-Companion Volume:
	Second-Order Notion of Culture. Collaborating to co-construct meaning Managing interaction Encouraging conceptual talk  Facilitating interaction with peers Facilitating communication in delicate situations and disagreements etc.