This paper reports on life-story accounts used to gain insights into the symbolic value language learners attach to French. The concept of "interpretative repertoires" is used to show how participants situate personal narratives in broader cultural discourses (a "Francophile repertoire") to construct their experience of Frenchness. Data from three…

The ongoing migration from the rural areas of South Africa to its cities is exerting strong influences on the language practices of the young, as they learn to cope with new living spaces where languages and cultures converge. Drawing on the theories of transcultural and transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet, 2005; Pennycook, 2007), this article…

This article discusses the potential value of developing pupils' intercomprehension skills at elementary school. This development construes Europe as a plurilingual and intercultural space in which the linguistic and cultural identity of each community finds its place. However, the construction of Europe also faces the challenges of assuring…

In this paper, we analyse the close relationship between the European higher education area (EHEA), the common European framework of reference for languages and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and show how the implementation of ICC in foreign language teaching can become an essential tool to acquire the full achievement of the EHEA.…

The study reported in this paper examines the experiences of Chinese and Vietnamese international students in engaging in their institutional written discourse at an Australian university. The study highlights the significance of exploring the real accounts of the students as the "insiders" and uncovering students' individual potential choices and…

This article presents an interview with Donal Carbaugh, a Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Chair of the International Studies Council (2004 to present). In 2007-2008, Carbaugh was Distinguished Fulbright Professor and Bicentennial Chair of American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has…

This paper is based on an analysis of chat transcripts from an English-language telecollaboration project between students at universities in Chile and California. This research found that the richest intercultural interactions involved events that could not have been foreseen: the immigrant rights demonstrations in the USA and the massive student…

In this study, I explore the experiences of five Japanese returnees ("kikokushijo"). The participants recorded taped monologues or wrote narratives reflecting on their time spent living abroad and of returning to Japan. These retrospective life stories revealed four prominent themes of conflict: group orientation; bullying and victimisation;…

Much attention has been given to the concept of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in recent years. In this article, the premises on which the claims of ELF are based are examined. These claims are submitted to critical scrutiny, and it is suggested that they may well be both statistically and theoretically flawed. More importantly, the dilemmas…

Drawing on the literature on Asian international students, current debates surrounding English as an international language (EIL), and the conceptual tools of appropriation, this article reports the findings of a qualitative research study with eight Asian international students studying at a university in Thailand to explore their taking…

This paper analyses the forms of mediation in interlinguistic interactions performed in Italian healthcare services and in contexts of migration. The literature encourages dialogic transformative mediation, empowering participants' voices and changing cultural presuppositions in social systems. It may be doubtful, however, whether mediation can…

This paper attempts to reframe identities as "interculturalities" in the multimodal ways in which language is used for identity construction, specifically as responses to questionnaires, articulations within limited narratives, on-line interactions and in community ways of speaking a localised variety of English. Relying on a framework of analysis…

Telecollaboration is an approach to intercultural learning that uses Internet technology as a tool to facilitate intercultural communication between classes of learners in different countries. The question of what language learners can gain from telecollaboration is fundamental in putting the case forward for its place in a language course. This…

In this article, the "multiple voices" of 13-15-year-old German and Italian adolescents in internet guest-books are analyzed. The study is based on guest-books texts with a mixture of different registers, languages and dialects. In particular, the German adolescents from the Augsburg region (Bavaria) display a strong regional linguistic identity…

This article sketches the processes of regionalisation in the realm of present day tourism. By exploring issues of "regional culture" and "diversity" in Austria, and more particular, in the highly symbolic Danube valley "Wachau", the article shows how the imaginaries of contested cultural spaces--be they "regional", "national" or "European"--are…