Read all about it! The December Spotlight

The December edition of Spotlight goes on sale on Wednesday, 25 November. Eamonn Fitzgerald spoke to Editor-in-Chief Inez Sharp about the next issue.

Fitzgerald: On the December cover, we see the word "Escape" and then "Great travel destinations". What's the story behind the cover story?

Sharp: Some people love Christmas, and others just want to be as far away as possible from all the decorating, celebrating, gift-giving and eating. For the readers who want to get away from it all, we decided to make our December travel feature about escaping to unusual and interesting places. Even if you can't take a journey at this time of year, you can take an armchair trip with our feature, which takes you to Britain, New Zealand, the United States and Japan in the company of four Spotlight authors.

"Language and culture can't be separated"

Fitzgerald: I see that the focus in the language feature is on communication across cultures as experienced in Britain.

Sharp: I think this happens to a lot of people: you learn a foreign language and have quite a good basic knowledge of that language. But the first time you find yourself in the company of a group of native speakers, you realize that even though you understand lots of words, you can hardly follow the conversation. This is, of course, because language and culture can't be separated — almost everything we say has a cultural nuance, and we need to understand that, too. The aim of the feature is to help Spotlight readers understand some of those nuances. It is a fascinating topic that can make language learning a difficult but also very rich experience.