English language learners should become successful intercultural speakers and global citizens promoting qualities that go beyond national boundaries. Supposed to be globally appropriate, global course books from Global North publishing houses reproduce coloniality and are neither neutral nor free of nationalism. Local(ised) teaching materials…

Although the notion of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been widely promoted in language classrooms, few empirical studies report how social media, such as Instagram, could be used as a virtual learning platform to engage students in learning how to communicate interculturally. Framed within the global Englishes (GE) concept as the…

To facilitate intercultural communicative competence, language learners are invited into the triadic capacity of Thirdness, where the social and critical interpretations of intercultural dialogue are explored. Little is known of the specific pedagogical stages to create such a terrain for the development of students' sustainable intercultural…

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study…

Through recent educational initiatives that incorporate native English speakers (NESs) in achieving English proficiency, Colombia has seen an increase in NESs working as teachers or teaching assistants. This interpretive study uses qualitative methods to understand how NESs stimulate intercultural exchanges and awareness between Colombians and…

Despite the global spread of English, it seems that voices from nonnative English teachers concerning English as an international language (EIL) are under-represented. To address the issue, this study sought to investigate the nonnative teachers' perceptions of idealized native-speaker linguistic and pragmatic norms in the EIL context.…

This paper is the outcome of an afterthought that assembles connections between three elements: the ambitions of cultivating cosmopolitan sensitivities that circulate vibrantly in connection with the internationalization of higher education, a course on Global Englishes at a Danish university and the sensation of vulnerability. It discusses the…

This study focuses on the syntactic properties of codeswitching within sentences uttered by bilingual speakers of Spanish and English in the USA or the so-called "Spanglish," by analysing data based on examples cited in the existing literature. To that end, I will examine the definitions of this cultural and linguistic phenomenon, make a…

This paper attempts to conceptualize identity prototypes regarding model L2 learners/users of English over the past 50 years, as embedded in research discourses. For a long time, the ideal learner was a "faithful imitator" whose L2 use and cultural conduct were strictly modeled on the native speaker (NS). With postcolonial changes around…

This introductory article examines how the papers in this special issue of "Language and Intercultural Communication" illustrate some of the many controversies relating to the immersion of the ever-increasing number of Hispanics into American culture, covering topics such as Spanish/English codeswitching, Spanglish, the varieties of…

The widespread use of English has--for better or worse--shaped the social and communicative norms and practices of many people the world over, and the likelihood of this continuing for the foreseeable future raises questions concerning English ownership, linguistic imperialism, language attrition, and mutual intelligibility, to name a few. These…

This case study examined how one instructor navigated between two competing discourses in an intermediate Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom: on the one hand, teaching "Standard Spanish" to help students achieve professional success, and legitimizing home linguistic practices on the other. In addition to expressing both…

Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and…

This article explores the rhetoric of the four official languages (English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) in Singapore and the domestic aversion towards Chinese "dialects" and colloquial "Singlish". The "Speak Mandarin Campaign" alongside the "Speak Good English Movement" represent a display of intercultural…

This article examines three critical issues relating to the role of culture in teaching English as an international language (EIL): Firstly, the way in which top-down processes of globalisation, accompanied by the widespread desire for English in many former colonial countries, have in general fostered the negative effects of dominance,…