The COVID-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place's anti-COVID battle. In the study, a locale's COVID-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime…

Intercultural communicative competence has been offered as an open-minded replacement for ego-centric biases stemming from dogmatic national prejudice and its associated self-aggrandisement. While being a commendable proposal, its implementation in foreign language education has not been a widespread success story. Recent attempts to theorise…

Discourses surrounding digital technologies have often foregrounded their capacity to connect people however, in reality, online communication can also result in fragmentation, polarization and modes of exclusion. To address these issues, this paper highlights the need for learners to develop a critical digital literacy (CDL) that contributes to a…

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…

This paper reports the use of critical incidents in three rounds of purpose-designed training events for 87 staff in three Chinese universities. To develop intercultural communicative competence (ICC), we present a possible framework of six intercultural approaches, combinations of which yield relevant principles as a rationale for ways of…

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 study investigated the effects of collaborative reflection (CR) on Iranian English language teachers' intercultural instructional practice. The data were gathered by observing the classroom instruction of four novice and experienced teachers before and after eight CR sessions. The result revealed that CR was an effective tool for improving…

As the main technique of grammar-centred teaching, translation apparently has no use in communicative teaching. However, this contradicts the idea that both translation and language teaching share the common goal of communication. This article argues that the underpinnings of translation coincide with the mediation skills promoted by CEFR and…

This paper evaluates the potential of intercultural contacts portrayed in the content and tasks of a Tunisian EFL textbook for third-year secondary school students to develop the model of the intercultural speaker. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the elements of intercultural contacts reveal that this portrayal is imbalanced in terms…

This study reports on the findings of a PhD study investigating the implications of the division between language and content in Modern Language degrees on students' development of intercultural competence and criticality across four universities, two in the US and two in the UK. It draws upon the theoretical frameworks of Intercultural…

The paper reports on the findings of a PhD study exploring the implications of the separation between language and content in Modern Languages for students' development of intercultural competence and criticality across four universities -- two in the US and two in the UK. In particular, it exposes the diverse views students developed on the…

This article presents a case study that examines how an online social networking community is constituted through intercultural discourse on the part of one learner sojourning in the US. Using Byram's model of intercultural communicative competence, this study examines the learner's naturalistic communication in a social networking site (SNS). The…

The intercultural approach to language teaching, intercultural communicative language teaching, has emerged in response to the limitations of communicative language teaching. As a result, the ultimate goal of foreign language (FL) education is being shifted from communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence (ICC). In China,…

Given a heavy social, ideological pressure for parents to pursue better English education for their children in the globalized world, short-term English immersion camp programs have emerged as an educational option in South Korea, promoted as environments for intercultural communication between native English-speaking teachers and local Korean…

This paper examines the self-perceptions of sixteen 11-year-old UK children who took part in intercultural "Villages" organised by an international children's charity. The analysis of the data shows that only a short-term increase in Intercultural Communicative Competence was reported by the children immediately after the Village. The…