ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overviews of the multiplicity of the concept of identity and then focus on the relationship between cultural identity and ethnicity. It explores interculturality, a line of enquiry that investigates how people employ interactional resources in identification. Identity is a difficult term to define, since it is rich with meanings and implicatures, both in its ordinary sense and in academic discourse. Cultural identity is very often described as a collection of multiple identities, consisting of predominantly ethnic identities along with other intersecting identities such as race, gender, class and religious affiliation. Recent years have seen growing use of the term 'interculturality' in public discourse, intercultural learning and education, and other related fields. In the field of intercultural learning and education, inter-culturality represents a language-and-culture learning pedagogy which believes that the goal of language learning is to become intercultural speakers, mediating between different perspectives and cultures, rather than to replace one's native language and culture with 'target' ones.