A

design perspective on intercultural communication in second/foreign language

education

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, School of Language Sciences, Universidad del Valle,
Colombia
Kristen Michelson, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Texas
Tech University
INTRODUCTION

Developing intercultural competence among second/foreign language (S/FL) students has
long been a stated objective of S/FL education. At times this outcome has been assumed by
mere virtue of learning another language, while at others it has been more intentionally
taught and measured, through models (e.g. Byram, 1997; Fantini, 2009) and conceptual
orientations (Kramsch, 2011; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013) that have emerged from within
and beyond the field of applied linguistics. A genealogical look into these models traces
back to decades of study into the nature and inter-relationship of language and
communication, the epitome of which has been the concept of communicative competence
(CC), which has continued to dominate classroom practice since the early 70s, and has been
highly influential for models of intercultural competence (IC). Yet, the rootedness of models
of IC in historical conceptions of communicative competence poses several problems for
their actual use within S/FL classrooms. One of the principal limitations inherited from
traditional views of CC is that communication remains verbocentric, operationalized as
linguistic activity. A second concern is that communication is considered a cognitive,
individual activity, rather than a social, co-constructed, multimodal process of meaning
making. A third limitation is their focus on the learner as intercultural speaker,
downplaying processes of interpretation that take place both in face-to-face encounters
and in intercultural engagement with texts.

In the paper that follows, we explore the way in which IC frameworks, as applied to S/FLE,
constrain possibilities for pedagogy through these limitations, and through their
predominant focus on assessing individual cognitive achievement to the detriment of
guiding students in learning to perform the kind of semiotic work that takes place in every
act of communication. First, we trace the development of notions of CC and IC, highlighting
ways that IC frameworks have failed to account for the different elements that intervene in
communication processes. Next, we argue for a shift in focus from developing and assessing
intercultural competence to developing interculturality, and highlight ways in which the
S/FLE classroom is particularly well-suited to this by expanding learners’ interpretative
frameworks, and thus their semiotic resources. Finally, we draw on heuristics from social
semiotics and multiliteracies pedagogies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; New London Group,
1996) to present possibilities for reconceptualizing IC in S/FLE.

FROM COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE TO INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE

During the last five decades much of the conceptual and research work in the area of
second/foreign language education (S/FLE) has spun around the concept of
communicative competence. Likewise, the concept itself has provided intellectual basis for
pedagogical activity, curriculum design, and teacher education guidelines. Despite
extensive and often controversial academic discussions begotten by the two words that
compound the term--competence and communication (Taylor, 1988; Widdowson, 1989;
Spolsky, 1989; Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1995; Leung, 2005; Firth & Wagner,
2007; Block, 2014, Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Álvarez Valencia, 2018)--the term
remains dominant in the field of applied linguistics.

Hymes first introduced the concept in the early 70s as a reaction to Chomsky’s prevailing
linguistic view of competence. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky (1965), evoking
the Saussurean distinction between langue (language as a system) and parole (speech),
offered his distinction between competence (the ideal speaker-listener’s knowledge of
language) and performance (the manifestation of language in concrete situations).
Chomky’s idea of linguistic competence was underlain by a monolithic view of language,
dissociated from any social context, and the priority of an idealized monolingual native
speaker was the role model for language development.

Hymes’ (1972) contribution to the understanding of communicative competence lies in the
centrality he gave to meaning and context and the way they are connected in a co-
creational and indexical dynamic with culture (Waugh, Álvarez Valencia, Do, Michelson, &
Thomas, 2013). Thus, ‘competence to communicate’ comprises not only the underlying
linguistic, social, cultural and psychological knowledge, but also the rules governing
appropriate and acceptable use of language. Hymes’ understanding of communication
transcended the traditional verbocentric and context-free views of communication and
language. Drawing on Jakobson (1960), Hymes acknowledges that in communicative
events, along with linguistic resources, interlocutors draw on other semiotic modes of
meaning making. Accordingly, an analyst should examine a communicative event as a
whole system of communication, which includes among other factors:


… the various available channels, and their modes of use, speaking, writing, printing, drumming,
blowing, whistling, singing, face and body motion as visually perceived, smelling, tasting, and tactile
sensation; (4) the various codes shared by various participants, linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic,
musical, and other (Hymes, 1974, p. 13).

By bringing the social and the cultural dimensions into the understanding of
communicative production and broadening the purview of communication to include
semiotic modes beyond the linguistic mode, the sociolinguistic revolution--in part
championed by Hymes (1972, 1974)--articulated a dynamic view of language in use
“situated in the flux and pattern of communicative events” (Hymes, 1974, p. 12) within a
speech community. At the same time, it clearly forecasted the advent of multimodality as a
more comprehensive approach to understanding the current communication landscape
and its textual habitats (Álvarez Valencia, 2016a, 2018).

Hymes’ view of language and communication had paramount ramifications for S/FLE
where the concept of communicative competence was immediately adopted (Savignon,
1972) in such a way as to inform the inauguration of the Communicative Language
Teaching approach (Savignon, 1983, 1991; Berns, 1990; Richards & Rodgers, 2001).
However, this transfer and further recontextualization of CC in the field of language
education in the long run distorted Hymes’ original comprehension of the concept
(Widdowson, 1989; Leung, 2005). Dubin (1989) asserts that:


it is apparent that over time there has been a shift away from an agenda for finding out what is
happening in a community regarding language use to a set of statements about what an idealized
curriculum for L2 learning/acquisition should entail . . . [The concept of communicative competence]
has moved away from being a societally-grounded theory in terms of describing and dealing with
actual events and practices of communication which take place within particular cultures (p. 174, as
cited in Leung, 2005, p. 124).

One of the main consequences of the didactization of the concept of CC was the loss of its
dynamic nature and the reduction of the phenomenon of communication to the exchange of
linguistic (verbal) messages (Álvarez Valencia, 2018). Highly influenced by the structural
paradigm, the field of applied linguistics privileged a cognitive, mechanical, and
individualistic view of language and communication (Firth & Wagner, 2007). Under this
perspective, it appeared convenient to establish an object of study (language and
communication) whose principal features were its systematicity, homogeneity, stability,
and transparency. This in turn facilitated curricular/syllabus development, test
construction, pedagogical and material design which bolstered the profitable business of
S/FL teaching and learning (Crystal, 1997; Graddol, 2006).

Likewise, the concepts of CC specifically, and communication more broadly, have been
strongly informed by developments in the field of second language acquisition (SLA),
where communication has been conceptualized as a facilitator to acquire language through
the exchange of transactional messages (e.g. the interactional hypothesis) and thereby
develop a linguistic system, with little regard to social and cultural dimensions; then later
as a tool for meaning negotiation, and more recently as “as an arena for positioning the
speaker vis-à-vis the wider community” in multilingual and multicultural societies
(Eisenchlas, 2009, p. 56) where communication becomes a site where issues of power,
identity, social structure, polities, and ideologies are indexed. Eisenchlas’ discussion
provides a context in which to understand an evolution of the models of CC from more
psycholinguistic-oriented (Canale & Swain, 1980; Bachman, 1990) to sociocultural or
intercultural views of communication (Byram, 1997).

Communication and models of communicative competence

Although many consider Canale and Swain’s (1980) framework to be the first model of CC,
their proposal was indeed a reaction to various existing ‘theories of communicative
competence’ at the time (e.g. Munby, 1978) that they deemed incomplete. Canale and
Swain’s (1980) initial tripartite model, composed of grammatical, sociolinguistic, and
strategic competence, was later modified (Canale, 1983) to include discourse competence.

Canale (1983) provides a rather instrumental definition of communication stating that it is
“the exchange and negotiation of information between at least two individuals through the
use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, oral/written visual modes, and production and
comprehension processes” (p. 4). In following, to a certain extent, Chomsky’s distinction
between competence and performance, Canale defined CC as “underlying systems of
knowledge and skills required for communication” (p. 5) where knowledge referred to
linguistic information available in the brain, and skills featured an individual capacity to
use that linguistic information in actual communication. The four areas of knowledge and
skills proposed by Canale comprised grammatical competence (i.e. understanding the
code); sociolinguistic competence (i.e. appropriateness of meaning and form in relation to
contextual factors and participants); discourse competence (i.e. the capacity to design
cohesive and coherent texts); and strategic competence (i.e. the capacity to use verbal and
nonverbal communication strategies to enhance effectiveness in communication, including
compensating for communication breakdowns).

Canale’s (1983) model presents an important conceptual improvement from that of Canale
and Swain (1980) in that the former acknowledges the role of nonverbal communication
that had been previously omitted. Yet, Canale’s (1983) proposal locates nonverbal
communication primarily in the sociolinguistic and strategic components of communicative
competence. Although this is an important step in recognizing the multimodal nature of
communication, this modular understanding of CC and particularly nonverbal
communication overlooks the fact that communication is an embodied (i.e. expression of
the body) manifestation of human experience (Wachsmuth, Lenzen, & Knoblich, 2008).
This omission is clearly observed in the way discourse competence is defined, which is
limited to the use of verbal devices to design unified texts (Canale, 1983). This definition
misses the point in so far as that in interactional exchanges speakers combine features of
nonverbal communication such as gesture, gaze, touch, and spatial distribution to create
discursive coherence and cohesion. In fact, the creation of coherence and cohesion in
interactive exchanges relies heavily “on the presence of an expressive body and its relation
to objects and other expressive bodies” (Wachsmuth, Lenzen & Knoblich, 2008, p. 3).

Bachman (1990), and later Bachman and Palmer (1996) proposed and refined their own
models of CC. Although initially conceived for the area of language testing, their model has
gained currency and has also informed language teaching and curriculum development.
Evoking Eisenchlas (2009), Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) model focuses on language use
(instead of communication) defined “as the creation or interpretation of intended
meanings in discourse, or as the dynamic and interactive negotiation of intended meanings
between two or more individuals in a particular situation” (pp. 61-62). Notice, though, that
despite being presented as a model that emphasizes language use, it draws heavily on
cognitive theory, judging from the two broad areas that comprised what they termed
‘communicative language ability’: language knowledge, or “a domain of information in
memory” (Bachman & Palmer’s, 1996, p. 67) and strategic competence, or “a set of
metacognitive strategies” (p. 67).

Within language knowledge are organizational knowledge and pragmatic knowledge,
where the former integrates Canale’s (1983) grammatical competence and discourse
competence, now termed grammatical knowledge and textual knowledge, respectively.
Grammatical knowledge involves knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, phonology and
graphology that contribute to recognition and creation of grammatically correct sentences.
Textual knowledge, on the other hand, includes knowledge of cohesion and of elements of
rhetorical and conversational organization.

Unlike Canale’s (1983) model, Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) proposal highlights the role of
pragmatics in communication. For the latter, pragmatic knowledge is the users’ capacity to
produce language related to their communicative goals and which is appropriate in a
particular context of language use. Pragmatic knowledge incorporates functional
knowledge (i.e. a user’s ability to produce utterances or sentences connected to their
communicative goals and in relation to an interlocutor’s intentions, as well as knowledge of
different functions of language that allow speakers to express and understand experience,
manipulate, create, and establish relationships (ideational, manipulative, instrumental, and
imaginative functions), and sociolinguistic knowledge. Sociolinguistic knowledge
broadened the description rendered in Canale’s model and incorporated dimensions such
as awareness about dialects of varieties, registers, idiomatic expressions, cultural
references and figures of speech that enable users “to create or interpret language that is
appropriate to a language use setting” (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, p. 70).

Drawing on Faerch and Kasper’s (1983) psycholinguistic model of language production,
Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996) describe their second component--
strategic competence--as a set of metacognitive strategies that enable cognitive
management in language use. Strategic competence operates by combining the elements of
user involvement in goal setting, assessment of communicative resources, and planning of
language use. Different from Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale’s (1983) strategic
competence which related more to users’ socio-interactive strategies to solve
communicative breakdowns, this newer understanding of strategic competence focused
more on users’ cognitive and affective mechanisms that could be used either in interactive
communication or in other contexts of discourse comprehension, such as reading a novel.

Although Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) models are considered to
have provided a more comprehensive understanding of communicative competence than
Canale and Swain’s (1980) and Canale’s (1983) models, in our view the models fall short of
acknowledging the multimodal nature of communication and results in legitimizing a
verbocentric view of communication. Communication is reduced to ‘language use’ and
dimensions such as nonverbal communication are outright eschewed. In referring to
Canale’s (1983) definition of strategic competence, Bachman (1990) states: “these
definitions include non-verbal manifestations of strategic competence, which are clearly an
important part of strategic competence in communication, but which will not be dealt with
in this book” (pp. 100-101).

Prompted by the lack of direct relationship between models of CC and objectives of
language instruction, Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995) proposed a ‘pedagogically
motivated model’ of communicative competence to inform Communicative Language
Teaching. The major emphasis of this model is discourse competence, which establishes a
relation of co-creation with sociocultural competence (knowledge of how to communicate
in accordance with social and cultural contextual conditions), linguistic competence,
(knowledge of lexico-grammatical elements) and actional competence (the capacity to use
speech acts and speech acts sets in conveying and understanding communicative intent).
Another component is strategic competence, which follows Canale and Swain’s (1980)
conceptualization in that it is the “knowledge of communication strategies and how to use
them” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p. 26). As such it includes strategies to initiate, terminate,
maintain or redirect communication in the face of interactive difficulties or communication
breakdowns.

A particular strength of this model is its ability to show, theoretically, a clear
interrelationship between the different components harnessed around discourse
competence. Moreover, it provides a more detailed list of elements that comprise each
competence providing guidelines “for curriculum design, language analysis, materials
development, teacher training, classroom research, and language assessment” (p. 30).
Nonetheless, similar to other models, it falls short of specifying exactly how curriculum
designers or instructors could do so. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) seem to expand previous
views of language and communication granting relevance to dimensions such as culture
and identity, as language is “not simply a communication coding system but also an integral
part of the individual's identity and the most important channel of social organization,
embedded in the culture of the communities where it is used” (p. 23).

Similar to Canale’s (1983) model, an asset of Celce-Murcia et al.’s (1995) proposal is that it
includes specific elements of nonverbal communication (kinesic, proxemic, haptic,
paralinguistic) within sociocultural competence, suggesting an underlying view that face-
to-face communication involves more than verbal exchanges. Nevertheless, this
perspective is reductive because it ignores other types of texts that users can create which
combine not only oral or written language but also images, artifacts and other semiotic
resources. As in the previous models, communication and CC are reduced to knowledge
and capabilities that are solely in the mind of interlocutors and not the product of co-
creation between cognitive and material resources and their affordances available in the
ecological spaces that surround communicative practices.

Of all the models presented so far, Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) forecast current interest in
intercultural aspects of interaction through their inclusion of cross-cultural awareness
within sociocultural competence. They vouch for its need because “there are so many
culture-specific do's and don't's that without any knowledge of these, a language learner is
constantly walking through a cultural minefield” (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995, p. 25). Although
the perspective underlying this statement falls within the tradition of cross-cultural studies
(Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009; Hofstede, 2012) characterized by conceptualizing
cultural practice as static knowledge that allows for the creation of lists of behavioral do’s
and don’ts for intercultural teaching, the authors open the door for discussing the role of
the cultural background of interlocutors in transnational encounters, an issue that at the
time had been discussed extensively in cross-cultural psychology (Hofstede, 1991),
anthropology (Hall 1959, 1966; Hall & Hall, 1990) and business management
(Trompenaars, 1993), with little development, however, in the field of language education.
It was only in the late 1990s that the contact between members of different cultural origins
was directly addressed in the area of S/FLE by Byram (1997) who proposed a model that
was instrumental for the Council of Europe’s eventual model of CC in the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

In 2001 The Council of Europe published the first version of the CEFR. More recently the
document has been updated to develop more detailed descriptors, and include illustrative
scales for mediation, reaction to literature, online interaction, young learners, and sign
languages (Council of Europe, 2018). CEFR was designed as a result of the work of an
interdisciplinary team across Europe with the aims of

promoting and facilitating co-operation among educational institutions in different countries;
providing a sound basis for the mutual recognition of language qualifications; assisting learners,
teachers, course designers, examining bodies and educational administrators to situate and co-
ordinate their efforts; facilitating quality in language education and promoting a Europe of open-
minded plurilingual citizens (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 25-26).

The CEFR breaks with Chomsky’s traditional distinction between competence and
performance and instead focuses on proficiency by proposing a ‘descriptive scheme of
language proficiency’, which, in this model, comprises the ability to perform
communicative language activities drawing on general competences or savoirs (e.g.
knowledge of the world), and communicative language competences (linguistic,
sociolinguistic and pragmatic), while making use of appropriate communicative strategies
(reception, production, interaction, mediation). As a proficiency model of CC, the CEFR
“embraces a view of competence as only existing when enacted in language use” (Council of
Europe, 2018, p. 33). Evoking Bachman and Palmer’s underlying view of communication,
the CEFR equates communication with language use and adopts an action-oriented
approach that “put[s] the co-construction of meaning (through interaction) at the centre of
the learning and teaching process” (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 27).


Figure 1. Components of the Descriptive Scheme of Language Proficiency (Council of
Europe, 2018, p. 30).

Unlike previous models of communicative competence that highlighted language skills
(listening, speaking, reading and writing) as core outcomes around which to design
communicative activities, the CEFR privileges communicative language activities and
strategies of reception (e.g. identifying cues and inferring), production (e.g. spoken and
written messages produced through strategies such as planning, compensating and
monitoring and repairing co-constructed language), interaction (e.g. spoken, written and
online interactional activities that are supported by interaction strategies such as turn
taking, cooperating, and asking for clarification), and mediation, which seem to more aptly
reflect how people use language. This latter - mediation - marks a clear shift from previous
models of CC in that:

In mediation, the user/learner acts as a social agent who creates bridges and helps to construct or
convey meaning, sometimes within the same language, sometimes from one language to another
 (cross-linguistic mediation). The focus is on the role of language in processes like creating the space
and conditions for communicating and/or learning, collaborating to construct new meaning,
encouraging others to construct or understand new meaning, and passing on new information in an
appropriate form. The context can be social, pedagogic, cultural, linguistic or professional (Council of
Europe, 2018, p. 103).

By introducing the concept of mediation, the CEFR situates its proposal within a
constructivist paradigm where language users-as-mediators adopt a central role in co-
designing and negotiating meanings through the construction of a pluricultural shared
space where linguistically and culturally diverse interlocutors are expected to engage in
positive and successful intercultural exchanges. In this way, the CEFR presents a more
comprehensive discussion of the intercultural dimension, scarcely found in Canale (1983),
Bachman and Palmer (1996) or Celce-Murcia et al.’s (1995) models. While the CEFR locates
the intercultural dimension within sociolinguistic or pragmatic competence, the former
models, to a great extent in consonance with Byram (1997), describe the intercultural
dimension as a separate component, yet still in close conjunction with pragmatic and
sociolinguistic competences. Nonetheless, in the CEFR, intercultural (pluricultural)
capabilities appear as communicative language activities and strategies rather than as a
full-fledged competence as presented in other models of intercultural competence (see also
Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009).

What is noticeable about the ‘descriptive scheme of language proficiency’ is that the idea of
reaching CC is substituted by the idea of reaching language proficiency. The traditional
components of CC are subsumed under a broader umbrella and the component of strategic
competence common to all previous models is conceptualized as communicative language
strategies that include planning, execution, and evaluation and repair, all of which operate
in different modes of communication: production, reception, interaction, and mediation. By
doing this, the CEFR evokes Celce-Murcia at al’s (1995) decision of locating the strategic
competence as surrounding the other components of CC to foreground the ubiquity of
strategic activities, thereby marking a step forward in showing the interrelatedness of the
components of CC.

However, a critical look at the CEFR’s model of language proficiency leads one to conclude
that it is unable to transcend the verbocentric perspective characteristic of its predecessor
models. In this model, language precedes communication as can be observed in the
‘descriptive scheme of language proficiency’ (see Figure 1) where ‘Overall Language
Proficiency’ appears as a superordinate term within which the components of CC appear as
subordinated. Moreover as shown above, communication is equated with language use, a
purview that is not completely aligned with the constructivist and ecological principles to
which the CEFR claims to adhere: “CEFR scheme is highly compatible with several recent
approaches to second language learning, including the task-based approach, the ecological
approach and in general all approaches informed by sociocultural and socio-constructivist
theories” (Council of Europe, 2018, pp. 29-30). In particular, we find limited
correspondence with ecological perspectives where language constitutes a semiotic system
among other systems that constitute communication. In this regard, van Lier (2004) states:

Language is not a system of communication that occurs in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is an integral
part of many connected meaning-making systems, in other words, it’s part of semiotics. In Chapter 2 I
presented a diagram of concentric circles that shows how important gestures, intonation, social and
cultural knowledge of various kinds, and so on, are. Meaning-making processes draw on all
those systems and clues, in interpretive processes of complex kinds (p. 223).

Although the CEFR acknowledges that paralinguistic elements participate in
communicative exchanges and includes descriptors for paralinguistic strategies, it does not
stray from the discourse that these elements are subservient to the language realm. As a
result, it dismisses the fact that paralinguistic elements (e.g. gesture, gaze) are part of a
semiotic system that informs communication as a whole. Yet, all types of communication
are multimodal in some way (Kress, 2010; Álvarez Valencia, 2016a; 2018). van Lier (2004)
asserts that “[c]ommunication is in reality always multimodal, that is, it involves more than
just seen or heard language. It also involves artifacts, pictures, gestures, movement and
much else” (p. 184). The CEFR, however, does not necessarily coincide with this postulate,
noting that: “Online interaction is dealt with separately because it is multimodal” (Council
of Europe, 2018, p. 93).

In sum, the CEFR, as well the models described in this section, represent a valuable
contribution to the understanding of the concepts of CC and communication in language
learning and teaching. Along its path, the field of applied linguistics and in particular
language teaching and learning have benefitted from contributions from different
disciplinary areas (Stern, 1983) that have enriched applied linguistics’ understanding
regarding the why, the what, and the how of its object of inquiry.

Different comprehensions of language (Graddol, 1993; Richards & Rodgers, 2001; van Lier,
2004; Kumaravadivelu, 2006; Larsen-Freeman, 2011; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Álvarez
Valencia, 2016b) and communication (Eisenchlas, 2009), along with their relationship with
one another, continue to emerge. Synthetic, logical, quantifiable, descriptivist and
categorical discursive constructions common in quantitative and positivist views of
knowledge inform most of the models of CC discussed above. In most cases their creation
has been motivated by assessment and testing agendas, which explains why subjective
dimensions such as power dynamics that partake in communication are absent from these
models, and instead communication has been reduced to an objective, transactional,
measurable activity. Kramsch (2016), for example, calls attention to this omission and
indicates that all human communication is a site of struggle where power is constantly
framed and re-framed. She proposes symbolic competence as “the ability to judge when to
speak and when to remain silent, when to talk about the inequalities of the ongoing talk
and when to let them pass, when to complain or counter-attack, and when to gently but
unmistakably read just the balance of power through humor or irony” (2016, p. 526). In
other words, symbolic competence implies a capability to identify how communicative
practices index discursive constructions about identity, race, gender, politics, and economic
interests.

The question about what it is that language teachers ought to teach–language (i.e. one of
many semiotic codes), or communication (i.e. meaning-making through all semiotic
modes), or discourse (i.e. culture and communication in mutually constitutive relationship
with one another)--is still unresolved given the verbocentric centrifugal forces of the
academic tradition that have governed applied linguistics. Although the language teaching
field has made enormous strides in studying language as communication (as exemplified by
the models of CC discussed above), it has failed to realize that language is not the only
component of communication, but one among many other semiotic systems that comprise
communication and constitute a discourse system. Furthermore, by presenting face-to-face
interaction as the main source of CC, it has also failed to acknowledge that in pedagogical
practice students’ interactions with other types of texts constitute a major resource for
communicative and (inter)cultural growth. The discussion around the development of CC
has become more complex with the recent emphasis on the cultural dimension, engendered
by recent developments in the social sciences and the transition from what some scholars
have called the ‘cultural turn’ (Byrnes, 2002; Byram, Holmes, & Savvides, 2013) towards
the ‘intercultural turn’ (Borghetti, 2013). We now turn to discussion of models of IC that
have been recruited in service of measuring yet another competence, and demonstrate their
rigid attachments to their CC predecessors.

INTERCULTURAL MODELS IN SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Except for the model of language proficiency proposed by the CEFR, in previous models of
CC the role of the intercultural dimension was marginal. Although they acknowledged the
relevance of cultural or cross-cultural aspects in S/FLE, their understanding aligned more
with a culturalist view (Bayart, 2005; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Dervin, 2010); that is, the
precept that cultural groups are homogeneous, stereotypical, and groupings are logical and
static. The intercultural perspective had long developed in other disciplines including
communication, social and cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, international business,
cultural studies, sociology (Balwin, 2017; Jackson, 2014), before gaining relevance in the
area of S/FLE through the work of scholars such as Geneviève Zarate, Michael Byram,
Claire Kramsch, John Corbett, Manuela Guilherme, Anthony Liddicoat and Angela Scarino,
to name only a few.

In higher education in general, and in S/FLE in particular, the most commonly
used and referenced IC models are those developed by Bennett (1986), Fantini (2009),
Byram (1997), and Deardorff (2006). Bennett's (1993) Developmental Model of
Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) is a linear model that describes individuals transitioning
from an ethnocentric to an ethnorelative state after experiencing six stages: Denial,
Defense, Minimization, Acceptance, Cognitive Adaptation, and Behavioral Adaptation.
Accordingly, in the first three stages the individual is not able to see outside his/her own
perspective while in the latter the individual develops the ability to think pluralistically.
The assumption is that individuals progress along a continuum toward a state of
ethnorelativity, which can be facilitated by encounters with people from other cultures. A
fundamental view inherent in this model is the framing of IC development (which it in fact
terms ‘intercultural sensitivity’) in the context of an individual’s reaction to a cultural
context (rejection of another cultural context and/or people through denial or defense
versus acceptance through acculturation or adaptation). Development is thus presumed to
occur in a linear process as a result of intercultural contact: specifically, where a sojourner
leaves his or her home country, travels to another country (and cultural context) and must
negotiate his or her affective feelings and reactions to a variety of cultural and social
situations.

Fantini (2009)’s comprehensive model comprises a series of attributes, abilities,
dimensions, and target language proficiency and developmental levels. With regard to
attributes, Fantini (2009) poses that an interculturally competent speaker is characterized
by qualities such as “flexibility, humor, patience, openness, interest, curiosity, empathy,
tolerance for ambiguity, and suspending judgments” (p. 459). In turn, these attributes
contribute to communicative efficiency achieved through three abilities: ability to establish
and maintain relationships, to avoid distortion or communication breakdown, and to
cooperate to accomplish a task with an interlocutor. The author then introduces four
dimensions that are common to other IC models: knowledge, attitudes, skills and
awareness, where awareness takes central stage as the propeller for development of other
dimensions. Like others, Fantini’s model incorporates a developmental component,
however distinguishes itself from Bennett’s (1986) developmental model by
acknowledging that IC is longitudinal and undergoes periods of progression, regression, or
stagnation. Fantini (2009) asserts that “target language proficiency is frequently ignored in
many models of intercultural competence” (Fantini, 2009, p. 459), which he deems vital, in
that the level of proficiency in the target language constrains or enhances, qualitatively and
quantitatively, the attainment of intercultural competence. However, here the language
dimension is reduced to knowledge of the host country language, thereby assuming that IC
is developed in the context of international travel.

Byram’s (1997) model of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is grounded in a
view of culture as “meanings, beliefs, and behaviours” (34), and an interactionist view of
communication where every encounter involves meaning negotiation. Unlike other models
of IC, Byram’s model integrates three traditional components of CC proposed in previous
frameworks: linguistic, sociolinguistic, and discourse competence. Likewise, like most
frameworks of IC (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009), Byram’s model also contains cognitive,
affective, and behavioral domains, calling these: knowledge (or savoirs), attitudes of
openness and curiosity (savoir être), and skills. The latter domain is subdivided into three
areas: skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre), skills of discovery and
interaction (savoir apprendre/faire), and critical cultural awareness/political education
(savoir s’engager) (pp. 89-102). More recently, Byram (2008) has expanded the component
of savoir s’engager linking it to the promotion of intercultural citizenship. The popularity of
Byram’s model in educational contexts can be attributed to the fact that not only does it
introduce a general descriptor for each IC dimension, facilitating assessment, but also a set
of curricular objectives that further qualifies each general descriptor. Byram’s (1997)
model developed out of the context of the Council of Europe around the time that
discussions about plurilingualism and interculturality were central to the European project
of charting S/FL learners’ language development through the CEFR. The imagined audience
for this model was, at the time, sojourning European students traveling to other countries
for exchange or study abroad. The interculturally competent individual in Byram’s original
model was an intercultural speaker (Byram, 1997, p. 72), which was a countermove to the
notion of native speaker in S/FLE (Wilkinson, 2012), a decidedly unattainable goal, and
therefore emphasized instead the flexibility of S/FL students in intercultural encounters,
specifically, encounters resulting from international mobility between nations. Although it
was not proposed with a specific accompanying assessment instrument, the model has
served as point of departure for others, such as the Intercultural Competence Assessment
(INCA) (European Commission, 2004) project which proposes levels of IC and assessment
rubrics describing a participant’s skill level.

Deardorff’s (2006) Pyramid Model of IC, although less frequently used in applied linguistics
research, is widely cited within the professional field of study abroad (in the US context),
particularly for the way in which her work offers a concrete model for educational
institutions to begin developing a comprehensive assessment system. IC in this context is
seen as a general project of US higher education, unlike Byram’s model where IC
development is linked to S/FL education. Like Bennett (1986) and Byram (1997),
Deardorff’s model incorporates cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. The
process begins within the individual and some ‘Requisite Attitudes’ that imply
predisposition of favorable attitudes such as respect, openness and curiosity. The
individual moves in a circular, recursive process from having these favorable pre-
dispositions, to developing specific ‘Knowledge and Comprehension’ and ‘Skills’ (e.g. listen,
observe, interpret), to the next phase which involves a shift in the internal frameworks
(‘Desired Internal Outcomes’), followed finally by an external outcome, i.e. the way in which
an individual behaves (‘Desired external Outcomes’ ). This process then feeds back into
the attitudes held by an individual and allows the cycle to repeat. In Deardorff’s model, the
“Knowledge & Comprehension” outcome includes “Cultural self-awareness, deep cultural
knowledge, and sociolinguistic awareness” (Deardorff, 2006, p. 256), thus we see a specific
reference to the importance of language, however, this is not a salient characteristic of the
model.

A critical appraisal of these four IC/ICC models highlights their limitations in their
respective views of communication. Although Byram’s and Fantini’s models highlight the
role of language and communication in developing IC, they are fraught with some of the
same limitations that characterize models of CC. First and foremost, they adopted a concept
of competence traditionally associated with the cognitive realm, thereby locating CC or IC
in the individual, and fragmenting competence into different components. The models
discussed here, and in general most models of IC, are list-oriented models (Matsuo, 2012;
Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009) because they prescribe cognitive (knowledge), emotional
(attitudes), and behavioral (skills) components upon which an individual should be
assessed. By focusing on the individual and locating IC in the mind, these models ignore the
notion that in communicative acts, competence is not located uniquely inside an
interlocutor, and are unable to theorize the interlocutor, the relational and interactional
aspects of communication, interdependencies, combinations, and levels of development
(Matsuo, 2012; Dervin, 2010). In terms of pedagogical practice, Matsuo (2012) asserts that
list-oriented models do not assist teachers properly because although they permit teachers
to identify when elements of the competence are present or absent in individual students,
it is difficult for teachers to operationalize them in terms of establishing relations and
dependencies among the competencies, let alone aligning pedagogical practice with these
outcomes. In their urge to comply with institutional and market demands rooted in
positivist assessment logics, proper of Eurocentric epistemological views (Peña Dix, in
press; Dervin, 2010; Lynch, 2001; Borghetti, 2017), commercial assessment models of CC
and IC (e.g., Hofstede, 2012; Hammer, 2012) have become desirable objects that, in the end,
support the one-size-fits-all ideology underlying pedagogical material design and
approaches in S/FL teaching. As a result, narrow, monolithic and static views of culture and
communication are imposed.

With the exception of Byram’s (1997) model which does include nonverbal elements of
communication and also acknowledges that discovery and interaction with ‘documents’ are
also sources of IC development, the models emphasize face-to-face encounters as the main
source of competency development, downplaying the role of engagement with other types
of texts as relevant sources for promoting interculturality. The models’ historical
conceptions of IC as anchored in interactional encounters between members of
transnational groups have given rise to a preponderance of empirical studies where IC is
didacticized primarily through such pedagogical formats and spaces as study abroad (e.g.
Shiri, 2015; Shively, 2010), telecollaboration (e.g. Ware, 2005; 2013), classroom role plays,
international guest speakers (e.g. Liu, 2017), and so forth. Many such activities involve
either physical or virtual mobility and therefore contact with speakers of the target
language or “cultural informants” from countries associated with the target language (see
also Piątkowska & Strugielska, 2017; Sercu, 2004). These formats and activities suggest a
view of IC as emerging only in people-to-people contact spaces, and place the pedagogical
focus on analysis of and/or reflection on interactions, miscommunications, or differences in
pragmatics. Such projects also tend to focus on the learner-as-speaker, and the
communicative patterns he or she adopts and deploys in moments of interaction. Put
another way, attention is focused on the productive mode of communication, and the
visible behaviors of learners that can be measured against the backdrop of the prescribed
ingredients that are theorized as evidence of IC.

Thus models of IC seem to serve as a signpost for what being intercultural looks like, but do
not adequately address, nor guide, in processes of becoming intercultural. By outlining the
ingredients of an interculturally competent individual, they serve to facilitate educational,
and indeed commercial, projects of assessment, yet leave behind any substantial
articulation of how exactly learners can get there. Although we acknowledge the relevance
of historical and contemporary models of CC and IC and the role they have played in
extending the horizons of applied linguistics, we argue that in S/FLE we should depart
from practice to design dynamic models, and not from models to design practice.

REFRAMING GOALS FOR SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Indeed, foreign language education is particularly synergistic with fostering interculturality
if one takes the perspective that becoming intercultural requires knowing how to read both
micro-level signs (i.e. in the interactional moment where meanings are being expressed)
and macro-level signs (i.e. the kind of social positioning occurring, and the broader socio-
cultural context). By “reading” we are referring to processes of “reading” individuals in
face-to-face communication situations, as well as processes of reading texts. In the
remainder of this chapter we argue that developing students’ interpretative capacities
through encounters with texts can be a precursor to more successful1 face-to-face
encounters with others, as the interpretive strategies and stances students can learn to
adopt in processes of textual interpretation can be, theoretically, applied to processes of
“reading” people. As Kern (2000) has asserted, “cultural understanding does not
automatically result from communication contact alone, but depends on a negotiation of
difference in genres, interaction styles, local institutional cultures, and culture more
broadly” (p. 276).

Following many others (e.g. Kramsch, 2011, 2016; Holliday, Hyde & Kullman, 2010;
Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012), we conceptualize culture as
dynamic and discursively constructed. Cultures, or rather discourse communities (Kramsch,
1995), emerge based on affinities (e.g. shared work, ethnic origins, hobbies, etc.), where
affiliations are fluid, and patterns of interaction—including social practices and
communication—are simultaneously conventional and variable. Individuals choose
particular forms of verbal and non-verbal communication (e.g. language, forms of
discourse, politeness strategies, clothing, gestures, body language, etc.) based on a
combination of their available semiotic resources, their understanding of conventions, their
choice to conform or not with those conventions, the particular identities they wish to
express, and/or the ideological stance they adopt. Thus, understanding culture requires
understanding discourse systems (Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012; Swaffar, Arens, and
Byrnes, 1991). An interculturally competent individual must have a certain degree of
discourse community-specific knowledge and a general intercultural stance that is open to
listening exquisitely in the communication moment for clues into how and why a speaker,
or text-author, is expressing him/herself in a particular way.

We propose that encounters with discourse communities via the interpretation of material
texts that not only incorporate the linguistic dimension but also other semiotic resources
that partake in meaning making processes can serve as a pre-text for successful encounters
with others. In so doing, we draw upon a multimodal social semiotic approach (Kress,
2010), including the notions of design and multimodality, and Pedagogies of Multiliteracies
(New London Group, 1996; Cope and Kalantzis, 2009), including the notion of genre in
order to demonstrate the compatibility of these principles in helping learners to prepare
for, participate in, and analyze intercultural encounters. Indeed, much scholarship has
argued for integrating activities of curating and/or analyzing cultural texts and discourses
in S/FLE contexts in the interest of developing IC, for example: portfolios exploring
stereotypes (Allen, 2004), analyzing ads (Moeller & Faltin Osborn, 2014) or film and other
media (Xue & Pan, 2012; Etienne & Vanbaelen, 2006, 2017; Daniel, 2017). While not all
studies necessarily refer to the development of IC, per se, such pedagogical projects align
with our view of intercultural experiences as occurring not only in the spaces of encounter
of individuals with members of other discourse communities, but also with texts of those
communities.

Intercultural communication as the encounter of designs of meaning

Each act of textual creation and interpretation involves processes of designing meanings. In
invoking the concept of design, we draw upon Kress (2000a; 2010; with van Leeuwen,
2001) where ‘designing’ is sign-making. Following a social semiotic perspective, ‘design’ is
both representation (i.e. the selection of material resources needed in designing) and
communication (i.e. the consideration of one’s interlocutors, communication context, what
is socially appropriate, or transgressive.) ‘Design’, therefore, simultaneously incorporates
both structure and human processes of transforming social structures in creating a new
sign (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). ‘Design’ is inherently dynamic: it implies that sign-makers
are constantly making choices in the moment of production of a message. This nuanced
view of ‘design’ underlies Kress’ (2010) multimodal social semiotic model of
communication, wherein a ‘rhetor’ is an agentive sign-maker who creates a sign in
response to a ‘prompt’ in the world. The rhetor, also often one in the same individual as the
‘designer’, selects the most apt resources for meaning making based on the particular
context in which s/he is acting (i.e. relationship with the interlocutor or institution, etc.).
The model accounts for an ‘interpreter’ who then takes this message (called the ‘ground’)
as a ‘prompt’ for meaning making in an ongoing chain of semiosis (Kress, 2010, p. 53). Acts
of meaning within this model occur out of the ‘interest’ of the sign maker; that is to say, the
rhetor has a particular goal or purpose: to communicate an idea, or an identity, or promote
a particular institutional discourse (e.g. Michelson & Álvarez Valencia, 2016). What is more,
the rhetor/designer is not merely choosing an available sign and re-using it, but rather is
re-making a new sign from available resources, based on what s/he considers to be the
most suitable semiotic resources for expression of his or her meanings.

As understood in Kress’ (2010) conceptualization of communication and ‘design’, identity
is not a static construct that is fixed prior to a particular moment of interaction or textual
production, but rather identity is constructed in the very act of such productions. As such,
this particular social semiotic conception of communication aligns with contemporary
notions of intercultural communication that view all interactions as negotiated
interactions. Put another way, we do not have identities or cultures, we perform them
(Holliday, Hyde & Kullman, 2010; Piller, 2000, cited in Dervin & Liddicoat, 2013) and those
performances are dependent on the dynamic nature of the communication context. The
notion of ‘design’ is further compatible with dynamic conceptions of intercultural
communication because it foregrounds the fact that the manner in which an individual
expresses meanings is partially related to the extent of their available design resources.
Furthermore, the available designs from which learners, teachers, or designers choose apt
resources for meaning making are culturally shaped. Different cultures have different
modal priorities, i.e. modes that are preferred over others as the most apt modes for
representation and communication of meaning (Kress, 2000, p. 199) not to mention
different linguistic available resources between individuals who share the same language.
Individuals’ selection of apt resources is thus shaped by what they have available to them
through their socialization, history, current context; in other words, what they have
gathered as meaning making resources throughout their lives (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).
The extraordinary range of resources available to individuals for designing are “never
simply of one culture but of the many cultures in their lived experience; the many layers of
their identity and the many dimensions of their being” (ibid., p. 204). Reiterating a central
theme in Kress’ work, Cope and Kalantzis (2000) also assert that designing does not merely
involve reproducing; rather designing is about creating (ibid.). Kress (2003) refers to this
process of designing as “doing semiotic work” (p. 37) in that by using signs, designers
simultaneously transform the environment in which the work is done, and are themselves,
also transformed in the process (Kress, 2000a, p. 155).

From pedagogical practice to dynamic models

Reframing the central goal of S/FLE from one of developing CC, and by extension
intercultural CC, to one of expansion of learners’ semiotic resources opens up substantial
new possibilities for teaching for interculturality. We now turn to a review of three
pedagogical projects from our own and others’ work in both L1 and L2 environments
which illuminate the ways in which broader views of communication--as multimodal, as
encounters with texts, as dynamic and socially co-constructed--have found relevance
within classroom contexts. Together, these pedagogies suggest a set of ingredients for
teaching for interculturality in shifting the focus from one of being interculturally
competent to one of becoming an effective intercultural interpreter and meaning designer
through attention to another rhetor’s designs of meaning and to one’s own meaning
designs that ensue from interactions with texts.

Designing meaning through multimodal genres

Ryshina-Pankova (2013) outlines the design of an advanced course in German centered
around discourses of environmentalism in Germany, using a range of genres through which
to expose students to both historical and contemporary discourses around this topic. By
virtue of incorporating multiple textual genres, students are invited into this topic and its
attendant discourses through multiple access points. Genre-based pedagogies are
especially compelling in engaging learners in inquiry of authentic texts of S/FL discourse
communities through analysis of how lexicogrammatical choice, author, audience, purpose
interconnect within a particular genre through the development of close reading of texts.
Furthermore, genre, through its role in “coordinat(ing) resources, … specify(ing) just how a
given culture organizes this meaning potential into recurrent configurations of meaning,
and phas(ing) meaning through stages” (Martin, 2009, p. 12) offers important pedagogical
scaffolds for the individual learner and the level of within-course instruction through its
predictable structures (Swaffar, 2004; Byrnes, 2005; Maxim, 2006), and its “web of text-
based performances that mobilize(s) audiences’ expectations in particular ways” (Arens,
2008, p. 39). Finally, as Byrnes, (2006) asserts: “careful meta-awareness of language use in
context not only encourages interpretive depth in and of itself; it also provides a
sophisticated, language-based, and transparent entree into an understanding of culture….”
(p. 43). Not only does Ryshina-Pankova incorporate multiple genres, she is intentional
about incorporating a range of multimodal genres. Multiple modes are important because,
as Kress (2003) asserts, different modes organize knowledge in different ways; each brings
its own distinct epistemological commitments (p. 57). As Kress describes: “The question
asked by speech, and by writing, is: ‘what were the salient events and in what (temporal)
order did they occur?’… while the question asked by display is: ‘what were the salient
entities in the visually encountered and recollected world, and in what order are they
related?’” (p. 14). Thus expansion of modes beyond a linguistic, verbocentric-only mode
typically prioritized in S/FL classrooms substantially expands possibilities for
understanding communication, and by extension intercultural communication. In addition
to the incorporation of multiple multimodal genres, a further strength of Ryshina-
Pankova’s (2013) project lies in the enumeration of specific guiding questions that serve as
a framework for helping learners unpack meanings in multimodal texts, all while drawing
upon their developing knowledge of discourses of environmentalism gleaned through
various texts.

Designing meaning through inner multi-modal sign-making

Taylor (2014) reports on a pedagogical project in which 13- and 14-year old students read
four different texts in their first language (two literary and two non-literary) and were
interviewed about their ‘inner sign-making’ in responses to those texts either through
visual sketches or through spoken or written signs (p. 230). Students’ responses were
categorized as either visual images, sounds, feelings, sensations, inner speech, or
reminders, categories that had emerged out their responses to texts in a previous phase of
the study. Visual images were the most common type of sign created by the students, which
the researcher analyzed through Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Grammar of Visual
Design framework. Specifically, among the group of five students’ responses were various
physical positions that they imagined for themselves vis à vis characters in one of the texts,
some imagining themselves on a similar plane, and others on a mountain top looking down
at the characters. Further responses evidenced students’ visualizations of the texts in either
film-like or series of still images, as well as students’ awareness of their voicing of the text
at various moments. Finally, all students shared experiences of sensations and feelings
experienced in the reading process, which varied from student to student. One could
imagine an extension of this project in which students are privy to each others’ inner multi-
modal signs as responses to texts. By sharing responses among the class, students become
sensitive to the variable reading positions taken up by individuals, which Swaffar and
Arens (2005) tacitly suggest is a precursor to becoming interculturally ‘competent’: “For
learners to behave as adults in cultural contexts, they must learn to negotiate cultural
differences, not expect absolute consensus, for example, about the meaning of a … text” (p.
95). Furthermore, allowing students to render their responses to texts through more than
mere verbal responses affords an expansion of possibilities for readers to design meanings
as they interact with texts.

Re-designing meaning through the voice of an other

Michelson and Petit (2017), drawing on Michelson and Dupuy (2014), present a model for
guiding students in encounters with multimodal texts, where students designed meanings
not as themselves, but through the lenses of fictitious characters whose identities the
students developed within the context of a Global Simulation2 framework. Interactions
between students-as-characters took place within the context of an imagined apartment
building in contemporary Paris, and in response to various situations and events the
characters encountered in their personal and professional lives. Situations, though
fictionalized, emerged out of actual events (e.g. mayoral elections in Paris, a controversial
immigration case), whose discourses students came to know through encounters with
texts. For example, in the case of the controversial arrest of Leonarda, an undocumented
high-schooler from Kosovo, students engaged with texts that summarized the events and
also presented various responses to those events. Specifically, they read an online news
article, in which were embedded: an image of Leonarda, an audio clip featuring groups of
highschoolers protesting in the streets, and a video clip of President Hollande’s public
address justifying the arrest. Students were guided in processes of interpretation and
analysis of texts by reflecting on visual designs in the image (i.e., colors, layout, posture),
their inter-relationship with the linguistic designs of the caption, and the relationship of
this ensemble of designs to the topic of immigration and the implied emotions of the young
girl. Further, they reflected on language forms (registers, colloquial expressions,
passive/active constructions) used by various rhetors, and the way in which these carried
particular messages. Authors present a sample set of guiding questions inviting students to
reflect on these different genres, as well as excerpts from students-as-characters’
responses to these events (e.g. social media posts, phone conversations with neighbors,
personal journal entries about the events). Authors demonstrate the way some students
were able to take up forms of discourse that reflected both their characters’ identities and
the ways in which French people were talking about and reacting to the events; in other
words, these students-as-characters became part of the conversations of the
foreign/second language discourse world, even if only virtually in the context of the
simulation. Additionally, students reflected on their design choices, in some cases
becoming aware of how the vehicle of the character invited them to think into and from
within a perspective outside of their default first language/cultural frame, as noted by one
student: “I believe that my character . . . was very different from myself and my general
opinions but by creating a character that contradicts your values or opinions you are
challenged to find the background knowledge to support these views” (Michelson & Petit,
2017, p. 154).

Taken together, these sample projects offer a heuristic for interpreting visual images,
demonstrate how entry into S/FL discourse worlds can be brought about through
encounters with multiple genres, offer expanded design possibilities for readers to express
their thoughts and feelings related to texts, call to attention learners’ own reflections on
their reading processes through their voicing of their responses, and offer concrete
examples of what can occur when learners are invited to redesign meanings through the
voice of an other in their own textual productions. Although not always explicitly stated in
these projects, such pedagogies align well with broader views of communication and
intercultural communication and multiliteracies approaches to teaching (New London
Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009), through their attention to the multi-modal nature of
semiotic resources for meaning-making, multiple ways in which meanings can be made
through the choice of available semiotic designs, and the acknowledgement of the
multitude of different backgrounds and social histories brought to the communication
situation.

We depart from these pedagogical models to formulate the following general principles for
S/FL education within a general project that reframes the concept of communication and
intercultural competence to focus on students’ process of becoming effective intercultural
interpreters and meaning designers.

1) Because different genres recruit semiotic forms differently and organize them according
to expected conventions of particular discourse communities, instruction should
incorporate multiple textual genres, with guided analysis of the relationship between
material semiotic resources and social, cultural or ideological meanings.
2) Because different modes communicate knowledge differently, instruction should
incorporate opportunities for interpretation of, as well as design of multimodal texts.
3) Similarly, learners should be invited to respond to texts not only through language, but
through other modes that might allow them to most aptly represent their interpretations.
4) Because our textual responses arise from encounters between our subjectivities and the
text, guidance in and dialogue around texts should be de rigeur.
5) Learners should be provided with opportunities for perspective-shift in order to raise
conscious awareness of values being conveyed and the semiotic resources being used to
convey those values.
6) Active, conscious, and articulated reflection on meaning designs, in both interpretive and
productive communication modes should accompany all encounters with texts.

In our view, adopting and incorporating these principles into the design of S/FL classroom
practice more completely acknowledges communication as occurring within different
design modes, within particular, situated, social contexts, and as a dynamic process of
choosing designs that most aptly fit a communication situation. Indeed, the models
presented here represent only a few of the growing number of projects that demonstrate
the way that S/FL classroom practice is already teaching for interculturality, which we
propose can be understood as:

an ability to move beyond the default mode of merely applying one's own available designs to a
communication situation, through development of the knowledge of other possible available designs
and a sensitiveness to understanding how such designs might be being recruited in order to make
meaning.

Intercultural communication is, ultimately, about encounters with others--whether in face-
to-face interactions, online interactions, or mediated through textual productions. In any
initial encounter, it is natural to “read” others against the backdrop of existing stereotypes
about particular communities or groups with which we associate our interlocutors or the
texts before us. In the S/FL classroom where language and culture are mediated largely by
texts, we have a particular opportunity to foster skills of learning to read others against the
backdrop of new discourse worlds, by guiding students in detailed analyses of textual
designs, introspection on their own responses to those designs, and by calling to conscious
awareness the subjective positions we take up in the interpretation of others’ designs. In
learning to “read” texts, we can learn to interpret semiotic design choices (e.g. language,
image, sound, intonation, gesture, etc.) based on a text’s context of production, including
author interest, assumed or intended audience, etc. Such textual interpretive skills might
also then mirror a general disposition of learning to read others not against stereotypical
backdrops, but rather against the backdrop of the identities and interests we ‘read’ them to
be performing and expressing in that moment.

However, such dynamic design processes elude facile measurement. Indeed, frameworks
such as the New London Group’s (1996) Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Cope & Kalantzis’
(2009) Learning by Design, and Kramsch’s (2006; 2011) conception of symbolic competence
present excellent points of departure for teaching designing meanings in both interpretive
and productive domains. And, while countless research and pedagogical projects in first
and second language education have taken up these orientations to learning, literacies
pedagogies remain in the margins of S/FL educational practice. Yet, literacies pedagogies
are directly tied to interculturality if one considers that becoming intercultural involves
becoming sensitive to both conventions and breaks with convention of particular forms of
discourse recruited for communication across a broad range of cultural texts and contexts,
and becoming sensitive to the variable ways in which rhetors recruit different signs and
symbols in order to convey messages based on a combination of their available design
resources, their understanding of conventions, their choice to conform or not with those
conventions, the particular identities they wish to express, and the ideological stance they
adopt.

CONCLUSION

As elaborated throughout this chapter, the rootedness of S/FLE in narrow notions of
communication and a pre-occupation with ‘competence’ in models of communicative and
intercultural competence places emphasis--both theoretically and practically--on
measuring and assessing learner outcomes, and has greatly constrained possibilities for
implementation of more dynamic frameworks into mainstream pedagogical practice. This
preoccupation construes the object of learning in S/FLE as one of acquiring a linguistic
code to a degree of proficiency that affords ‘appropriate’ interactions with interlocutors
rather than one whose central aim could be seen as expanding semiotic resources for
meaning-making, resources that would then theoretically be available in all forms of
intercultural communication: not only the interactional encounter between members of
transnational groups, but also at the intranational and intragroup level, where different
sociocultural practices and choices about the presentation of self that crystalize
individuals' identities and affiliations are inherent in every encounter. Waugh, Álvarez
Valencia, Do, Michelson & Thomas (2013) reminded us that “[l]inguistics has moved from a
monologic view of the language faculty towards a more dialogical, pluralistic, dynamic and
integrative view of how speakers, contexts and meaning interplay” (p. 634). Paradoxically,
mainstream S/FL language education continues to lag behind, though not for a dearth of
materials. If education purports to prepare students for experiences in the world, then it is
the responsibility of S/FL education to embrace a view of communication that more aptly
reflects how meanings are made and exchanged in all manner of encounters.

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1
By “successful”, we mean interactions—brief or sustained—in which a relationship of mutual respect is
enacted.
2
Global Simulation (GS) is a pedagogical framework that involves the creation of a fictitious world that is
grounded in real-world contexts. It involves learners taking on specific roles and interacting within a shared
community. In a GS, a context is construed that makes learning meaningful and goal-directed, as students
work collaboratively together to advance the storyline or complete a project.