In an interview with a postgraduate student about her intercultural experience of recently arriving for study abroad, it was found that the two researchers and the student were engaged in a mutual exploration of cultural identity. The interview events became conversational and took the form of small culture formation on the go in which each…

This article theorises the relationship between language and intercultural learning from a Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, based on the language learning story of Federica, a mobile student in UK higher education (HE). I first outline the context of UK HE and its internationalisation agenda, discussing how research in this field has…

The paper highlights the role of translation in qualitative research that involves multiple languages. Its particular focus is on untranslatables, that is, those words or phrases in a source language that pose challenges to translators because no direct equivalent is available in the target language. "Untranslatables" create moments of…

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…

This study intends to highlight the role that Foreign Language Education (FLE), particularly in the Higher Education context, can play so as to contribute to the rapprochement of two distant and still mutually unknown countries such as Portugal and Turkey. In this sense, it ultimately aims at supporting the training of intercultural speakers,…

In this qualitative study, we examine the impact of family migration on intergenerational learning, especially in relation to the transmission of cultural values and practices. Drawing on data collected through in-depth case studies with migrant Polish children and their parents, we explore the influence of intergenerationality on children's…

The present study explored the identity (re)construction of five nonnative English teachers who went to the USA on a prestigious scholarship for one year to teach their native language, Turkish. In that sense, it investigated how this shift from being a nonnative English teacher to a native Turkish teacher influenced their self-image,…

Internationalisation has recently become one of the major developmental goals within many institutions of higher education, where the use of languages on campus plays an important role. While research focusing on the use of English in higher education is growing, little attention has been paid to out-of-class contexts. This paper reports on the…

The paper discusses an Oral History project undertaken from 2009 to 2012 in Cyprus. As Cyprus is a politically volatile and geographically divided country with a Turkish-Cypriot north and a Greek-Cypriot-dominated south, this project attempted to show ways in which the two sides might be able to re-approach each other by claiming a common past. It…

Despite their diverse national backgrounds, 28 interviewees speak similarly about the complexity of the cultural realities with which they live, and refuse to be pinned down to specific cultural types. While nation is of great importance, unless personally inspiring, it tends to be an external force which is in conflict with a wide variety of…

This paper is concerned with the impact that public and political discourses on the issues of language and ethnicity in Germany have on integration. It suggests that a combined effect of factors such as the traditional concept of "Germanness", peculiarities of Russian Germans' "cultural identity" and certain aspects of German…

The purpose of this paper is to better understand how critical pedagogy and multicultural education can help meet the challenges that world language teachers experience in the teaching of culture. The authors believe that eliciting and understanding the voices of foreign language student teachers is essential to help them learn to mediate their…