Martin East
The intercultural dimension of the language learning experience is one that hastaken on increasing significance over the past decades. As Byram (2018) remindedus, 'intercultural competence' (IC) as a term of relevance to language pedagogyarose in the 1980s as a development to 'communicative competence.' The constructof communicative competence was, by that time, beginning to become embedded asinforming the principal aim of language teaching and learning programmes. That is,for many years students have been learning languages in a variety of ways and in arange of different contexts, but with a primary goal of learning how to communicatein the target language (TL). However, as TL users in real-world contexts initiatecommunication with TL speakers, they are necessarily confronted with situations thatmove communication beyond the pure use of language and require them to negotiatewith, as Byram (e.g., 2021) put it, beliefs, meanings, values and behaviours that maybe very different from their own. This has implications for effective communication.Indeed, all TL interactions are encounters with 'otherness' that require navigationbeyond just choosing the appropriate words for the context; hence the emergence ofIC as a construct of interest in language education.