ABSTRACT
In recent years, the concept of intercultural competence (IC) has been repeatedly challenged as the term is often understood in a ‘non-simultaneous way’. In particular, rigid attributions of cultural identity along national lines (see Hofstede & Hofstede, 2004) are ‘opposed to the reality of our world’ and are ‘out of line with the current Zeitgeist’ (Dervin, 2016). While, throughout the book, the concept of IC has been understood from a ‘critical’ perspective, focusing on the work on Barnett (1997) on criticality and Byram’s fifth savoir, critical cultural awareness, the findings of the study suggest that there are dimensions of IC which extend beyond Byram’s (1997) ICC model and Barnett’s conceptualisation of criticality. The chapter seeks to define and contextualise the two new competencies of communicative criticality and savoir se reconnaître, which were informed by data emerging from the staff and student interviews. The chapter further challenges traditional models of intercultural competence, including Byram’s ICC model, and proposes a new understanding of the intercultural dimension within language education that emphasises the ‘intercultural’ as a ‘fluid’ process of being and becoming. This also draws on Dervin’s (2010) notion of ‘interculturality’, which attempts to move away from the problematic notion of culture, and towards a critical analysis of interactions between people, whose multifaced identities (e.g. language, gender, social class and generations) should all be taken into account (Clark & Dervin, 2014).
