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The term ‘intercultural’ emerged in the eighties in the fields of intercultural education and intercultural communication. Both are part of an effort to increase dialogue and cooperation among members of different national cultures within a common European Union or within a global economy (for a review, see Kramsch 2001). Intercultural education as a component of a humanistic education is pursued with particular intensity in the Scandinavian countries (e.g., Hansen 2004a & b) and in Germany (for a review see Königs 2003).

In foreign language study, the concept of intercultural learning has emerged in recent years in Europe alongside the concept of communicative competence (e.g., Bausch et al. 1994, Byram & Fleming 1998, Zarate 2004); it characterizes a form of language learning that is less focused on approximating a native speaker linguistic or pragmatic norm than it is based on the subjective experience of the language learner engaged in the process of becoming bi- or multilingual and struggling with another language, culture and identity. The concept has been an object of controversy in Germany between discourse analysts (Edmondson & House 1998) and educational linguists (Hu 1999).

For Edmondson & House (1998), as for many researchers in pragmatics, conversation and discourse studies, entities like culture, power, identity are constructed across turns-at-talk and in the minute-byminute negotiation of face, stance and footing. Since, in their view, communication is the raison d’être of language learning, language instruction should focus on the study of culture in discourse, i.e., the cross-cultural dimension of discourse pragmatics and the misunderstandings or successful understandings brought about by the discursive management of language itself. Language teachers should teach non-native speakers how to recognize and adopt the discursive behavior of the native speakers whose language they are learning, in order to find out ultimately how they think, what they value, and how they see the world. In short, foreign language instruction should focus on communicative competence and the cultural dimensions of discourse competence, not on intercultural competence.

Hu (1999) argues that the concept of culture as used by Edmondson & House is too restricted and essentialistic. To assume that ‘German culture’ speaks through the discourse of a speaker of standard German is an inappropriate assumption in our days of hybrid, changing, and conflicting cultures. For Hu, concepts like ‘communication’, ‘language’ and ‘culture’ cannot be taken at face value but must be problematized. Hence the usefulness of the term intercultural, that covers intra- as well as interlingual communication between people who don’t share the same history, values, and worldviews. An intercultural pedagogy takes into account the students’ culturally diverse representations, interpretations, expectations, memories, and identifications, that are, in turn, thematized, brought into the open through personal narratives and multilingual writings, and discussed openly in class. Hu’s perspective on culture, like that of many educators working with immigrants, is close to the post-modernist perspective discussed below.

The German debate surrounding the notion of intercultural is emblematic of the problematic role that culture plays in language teaching at a time when national and other collective cultures are increasingly denationalized, deterritorialized, and are becoming more hybrid than ever. With the increased mobility of people and global markets, popular culture is shared by young people around the globe; with television and the Internet, attitudes and worldviews are no longer associated with geographical locations but interpenetrate one another in a myriad ways. Culture becomes a portable and variable concept, linked to historical stereotypes, personal memories and socialization patterns or habitus (Bourdieu 1991), that are activated by individual speakers in face-to-face interactions or Internet communication and are always subject to change, depending on the interlocutor, the topic, and the circumstances. This more variable notion of culture is nowhere more apparent than in the teaching of English as a foreign or second language.