ABSTRACT
How might good intercultural relationships be developed which do not provoke or
perpetuate such statements about research? How can good intercultural language
teaching and learning be fostered and how might good intercultural research take
place? Who judges how good this is and against which criteria? On first reading,
these questions may appear to be concerned with the functional issue of quality
assurance in intercultural language education how it is that the profession of intercultural language educators ensures that standards are in place and benchmarks
are attained, that the research undertaken is done in a satisfactory manner. Much
energy has been spent in recent years on such questions of quality and the
development of frameworks for intercultural language education. In Europe, the
Common European Framework of Reference has given rise to a set of standards and
approaches to intercultural language pedagogy which have found resonance world-
wide (Byram & Parmenter, 2012). Similarly, in a variety of national and international
research contexts, sets of standards have been elaborated with regard to the good
conduct of empirical research with human subjects. This work has unfolded in
national settings and in accordance with national laws and policies regarding the
nature of research and education. The questions of good intercultural relationships,
language pedagogy and good intercultural research are also questions of ethics,
pertaining to what constitutes just relationships, what might be virtues in the conduct
of intercultural research, how teaching might be done in such a way as to enable
human flourishing, restorative research relationships and where research is not one
of the ‘dirtiest of words’ and the experience lends itself to a different kind of poetics
altogether.
