While communicative competence is characterized by the negotiation of intended meanings in authentic contexts of language use, intercultural competence has to do with far less negotiable discourse worlds, the "circulation of values and identities across cultures, the inversions, even inventions of meaning, often hidden behind a common illusion of…

In her recently published book "The Multilingual Subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters", UC Berkeley applied-linguist Claire Kramsch approaches language learning from a new, visionary perspective. Foregrounding the interplay of cultural aspects in language learning, Kramsch understands…

This paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of individual multilingualism by focusing on a semi-autobiographical essay written in 1917 by an author who is usually read as a monolingual German writer but who was, in fact, multilingual and multicultural: Franz Kafka. The story is about an ape who, in order to survive his capture by the…

This paper was addressed to an American audience in response to Mary Louise Pratt's Una Lecture, "English-only "vs." National Security: Language and contemporary geopolitics", at the University of California, Berkeley on March 16, 2004. It makes the point that it is not enough for Americans to learn foreign languages; they must also understand…

Describes the phases of a research project in which the author moves from classroom to library, from empirical data to theoretical framework and back again. The methodology includes a comparative dimension through the collection of data from learners in three countries and demonstrates the development of insights from these three sources to gain…

We discuss the challenges of Web-based teaching for language teachers and then describe in detail an extended episode of misunderstanding that occurred between 2 students discussing their versions of history during a classroom-based, asynchronous telecollaborative project between learners of German in the United States and learners of English in…

Analyzes the social and historical reasons for the pervasive resistance among foreign language teachers in three countries to go beyond linguistic training and the anecdotal transmission of cultural facts. The article sketches the principles of a discourse-based pedagogy that views culture as language and language as culture. (36 references)…

A cross-cultural training seminar involving French, German, and American language teachers is described. The program was designed to examine the influence of teachers' cultural perceptions on selection of authentic instructional materials, sources of linguistic misunderstandings, and teachers' strategies for resolving cultural conflict. (MSE)