English language learners should become successful intercultural speakers and global citizens promoting qualities that go beyond national boundaries. Supposed to be globally appropriate, global course books from Global North publishing houses reproduce coloniality and are neither neutral nor free of nationalism. Local(ised) teaching materials…

Although the notion of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been widely promoted in language classrooms, few empirical studies report how social media, such as Instagram, could be used as a virtual learning platform to engage students in learning how to communicate interculturally. Framed within the global Englishes (GE) concept as the…

To facilitate intercultural communicative competence, language learners are invited into the triadic capacity of Thirdness, where the social and critical interpretations of intercultural dialogue are explored. Little is known of the specific pedagogical stages to create such a terrain for the development of students' sustainable intercultural…

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study…

Through recent educational initiatives that incorporate native English speakers (NESs) in achieving English proficiency, Colombia has seen an increase in NESs working as teachers or teaching assistants. This interpretive study uses qualitative methods to understand how NESs stimulate intercultural exchanges and awareness between Colombians and…

This introductory article examines how the papers in this special issue of "Language and Intercultural Communication" illustrate some of the many controversies relating to the immersion of the ever-increasing number of Hispanics into American culture, covering topics such as Spanish/English codeswitching, Spanglish, the varieties of…

The widespread use of English has--for better or worse--shaped the social and communicative norms and practices of many people the world over, and the likelihood of this continuing for the foreseeable future raises questions concerning English ownership, linguistic imperialism, language attrition, and mutual intelligibility, to name a few. These…

"Nativeness" has been recognised for two decades now as a problematic concept within applied linguistics, yet other areas of language analysis have been slow to question it, with some continuing to treat it as a primordial fact of nature. This paper briefly examines the history of the "native speaker" and the shifts in thinking…

Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and…

This paper argues that the challenge of intercultural communication has often been overlooked in discussions of indigenous language literacy in Africa. The omission continues despite the fact that literacy practices in Africa have often served as a means of intercultural communication, especially among highly educated Africans. Proposals for the…

Learning new languages potentially gives people vital skills to build more successful relationships, and understanding the social influences at work today may help us to know which type of language education is most beneficial. This article explores three social influences--globalisation, localisation and glocalisation--from the perspective of…