Description

The intercultural dimension of the language learning experience is one that has

taken on increasing significance over the past decades. As Byram (2018) reminded

us, "intercultural competence" (IC) as a term of relevance to language pedagogy

arose in the 1980s as a development to "communicative competence." The construct

of communicative competence was, by that time, beginning to become embedded as

informing the principal aim of language teaching and learning programmes. That is,

for many years students have been learning languages in a variety of ways and in a

range of different contexts, but with a primary goal of learning how to communicate

in the target language (TL). However, as TL users in real-world contexts initiate

communication with TL speakers, they are necessarily confronted with situations that

move communication beyond the pure use of language and require them to negotiate

with, as Byram (e.g., 2021) put it, beliefs, meanings, values and behaviours that may

be very different from their own. This has implications for effective communication.

Indeed, all TL interactions are encounters with "otherness" that require navigation

beyond just choosing the appropriate words for the context; hence the emergence of

IC as a construct of interest in language education.