This paper takes a social constructivist position of culture, identity, and classroom discourse in exploring the "culture talk" of international students in a university English for academic purposes (EAP) course. The analysis focuses on the interactional work being accomplished by the students as they participate in a classroom task about traditional clothing. Results show how participants used cultural affiliations and disaffiliations systematically in their talk to establish competing discourses and to make available multiple identities, which were then taken up and transformed by co-group members. Implications of this study relate communicative practices that take place in university EAP courses and the possibilities for teachers to move beyond a compare-contrast approach to teaching and learning culture toward a pedagogy of intercultural understanding. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)