It has now become a commonplace to state that foreign language learning should be viewed from an intercultural perspective. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence instead of mere communicative competence. It follows that new professional demands are made on teachers. The assumption seems to be that teachers are already moving in the advocated direction and are willing to support the new objectives put forward. The observation that this belief remains largely intuitive with little rigorous evidence to support it constituted the rationale for the research we report on here. The study's aim was to enquire into how the current professional self-concepts of Flemish teachers of English, French and German relate to the envisaged profile of the intercultural foreign language teacher and into the extent to which their teaching practice can be characterized as directed towards the attainment of intercultural communicative competence instead of towards communicative competence. The findings of this study inspire optimism that progress is being made and that teachers are willing to support intercultural objectives. At the same time, our hypothesis that teachers might not yet have left approaches that favour the teaching of communicative competence for approaches directed towards the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence found confirmation.