This edited volume explores the educational significance of intercultural experience. It offers a broader conception of interculturality than commonly found in the area of foreign language teaching. Contributors represent a diverse range of academic and professional interests. The aim of the book is to encourage dialogue and interchange across this range, and beyond, to stimulate thinking about the educational value of intercultural experience.

Mindful of the fact that cultures are now more interdependent than ever, this book explores the development of critical cultural awareness through the processes of teaching and learning about foreign cultures. It draws upon theoretical foundations relating to inter- and intra-cultural communication from contemporary philosophical movements, namely Critical Theory and Postmodernism. The study adopts Critical Pedagogy, as it is described by Freire, Giroux and others, as the educational framework providing guidelines for taking a critical perspective towards both native and foreign cultures....

This book examines the influence of cultural values and communication styles on intercultural communication and demonstrates how training can develop intercultural communication competencies. A large number of interactions between well-educated immigrants from all continents and from more than a hundred countries, together with some including native speakers, are examined and participants' answers to questionnaires compared with their actual communicative behaviour. The author raises questions of interest to many groups: linguists, educators, business people and sociologists. Which values...

The now familiar forces of globalisation and internationalisation are influencing the role and significance of language teaching and learning in contemporary classrooms. This affects the ways in which English is taught and learnt in particular but is also an inevitable factor in all language teaching and learning. The authors of the chapters in this book all share a concern to explore the ways in which the contexts in which language teaching takes place impact on the aims and the methods of language teaching. Some do so by discussing the implications for what research we do and how we do...

Teaching and Learning Languages and Intercultural Communication is not a neutral enterprise. Critical Pedagogy, as a movement and an intellectual field, engages with the political and ideological questions raised in educational practices. In this book the respective fields of languages, intercultural communication and critical pedagogy are brought into dialogue, dissent and reflection.

Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Communication: An International Investigation reports on a study that focused on teachers' beliefs regarding intercultural competence teaching in foreign language education. Its conclusions are based on data collected in a quantitative comparative study that comprises questionnaire answers received from teachers in seven countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland, Mexico, Greece, Spain and Sweden. It not only creates new knowledge on the variability, and relative consistency, of today's foreign language teachers' views regarding intercultural...

The book presents a new theory of the relationship between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective. The fundamental view is that languages spread across cultures, and cultures spread across languages, or in other words, that linguistic and cultural practices flow through social networks in the world along partially different paths and across national structures and communities.

The internationalisation of higher education has led to study abroad being a large scale phenomenon. Students spend short periods on study tours or a year or more taking courses in foreign universities. Studying aboard cannot be dissociated however from learning to live in another country and culture. The need to adapt to a new education system is obvious but the inevitable difficulties of living in another culture for the purpose of study are also an important facet of the whole experience. Chapters in this book report research into this whole phenomenon. Authors have researched students...