The aim of this study is to set out to explore how children living in Polish-English transnational families in the UK develop "symbolic competence" and "symbolic power" in home settings. By focusing on the children's use of metaphor in family discourse when talking about the Moon, from a cognitive discursive perspective, this…

This article is an investigation into the characteristics of intercultural competence in a face-to-face tandem language learning context between English and Chinese postgraduate students. It examines idiomatic meaning exchanges through the adoption of a conversation analytical perspective. It is a contribution to the existing body of knowledge on…

This study utilises the 'small story' approach to investigate metaphor in mobile students' narratives of intercultural experience. Metaphor in narrative is seen as a dynamic, discursive, and sociocognitive phenomenon. The narrative accounts presented in this paper derive from interviews conducted for mobility project evaluation. The participants…

Language educators in Australia and Finland are expected to foster intercultural understanding within foreign language education. This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study focusing on theoretical and practical intercultural understanding in secondary school language education. The data for this study includes lesson observations…

Research on the intercultural is challenged by the contextuality of the object of the research. While theories on intercultural learning generally acknowledge that the "context" of the individual learning experience plays an important role for intercultural learning processes, a detailed understanding of what it is we call…

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 paper forms part of a wider research project which examines how the Kantian concept of "Mundigkeit" or "maturity" may be represented in subjective accounts of language learning, known as "language learner narratives". It is shown that the metaphors used in these texts frequently do not so much represent congenial relations of hospitality…

This paper takes issue with recent claims regarding the impossibility of the transcultural narrative. After demonstrating the possibility of such narrative, a metaphorical model is proposed as a useful means of approaching the transcultural narrative. It is shown how an intellectual process of analogy and an affective process of empathy enable the…

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reading of "Handwriting", the book of poems by the Canadian-Sri Lankan author, Michael Ondaatje, in which he recovers the recent and ancient cultural history of the island through his reading of different types of scripts and languages. The texts that Ondaatje rewrites in his poems are visual,…