Editorial

One of the aims of this journal is to be ‘stimulated by contemporary, critical perspectives in understanding cultural practices and intercultural relationships’ (Language and Intercultural Communication [LAIC], n.d.). In this respect, this journal – and the association which spawned it (International Association of Language and Intercultural Communication [IALIC], n.d.) – does not shy away from analyses of language and culture which explore the ways in which relations of power are constructed, maintained and transmitted, either within intercultural contexts of single-language use, or within multilingual and multicultural contexts. Intercultural communication is often linked to the concept of globalisation – indeed, how often have we listened to presentations or read papers which start: ‘in the current era of globalisation … ’, or some such – as if globalisation is something new, or a relatively recent phenomenon. In our view, and in the views of not a few others more learned than ourselves (e.g. Hindess, 2008; Hirst, Thompson, & Bromley, 2009), globalisation has been around for hundreds of years.

However, we would concede that we are living in a distinctive era of globalisation, quite possibly intensified by David Harvey's famous ‘space-time compression’ (1990). This certainly has implications for the use of language and the conceptualisations of ‘culture’ and cultures worldwide, which are sadly marked as much by collision as by harmonious synthesis. However, we would suggest that this ‘era of globalisation’ is quite possibly also marked by a distinctly neoliberal taint which has had some considerable impact upon our field. The great French theorist, Michel Foucault, engaged towards the end of his final, posthumous series of lectures (2008) with a review of what he called ‘American neo-liberalism’, which he regarded as being responsible for reconfiguring human capital as a matter of economic importance. He regarded the economic rationalisation of mobility as being one of the features of the enhancement of human capital brought about by this modality of capitalist thought. On this argument, migration is a form of investment on the part of an economic subject. It can be analysed as a balance between costs and benefits: on the one hand, it involves both a psychological and material cost ‘due to the fact that the period of adaptation will certainly prevent the individual from receiving his [or her] previous remunerations, or those he [or she] will have when he [or she] is settled’ (p. 230). It is not often that Michel Foucault speaks directly to the concerns of our association, but it strikes me forcibly that this analysis has powerfully informed the warfare, skirmishes and hand-to-hand combat that International Association of Language and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) has been engaged in since its inception, and has indeed been fought out in our field for very much longer. For this passage reminds me just how squarely much of the voluminous literature in our field that engages with intercultural adaptation and intercultural competence is situated within this discourse of neoliberalism, which on Foucault's account has been running broadly speaking since the incumbency of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, respectively, in the USA and UK. In this issue, we feature 10 papers which focus on intercultural research and pedagogy which emerges from universities in Scotland, Australia, Ireland, Mexico and the USA; secondary schools in Catalonia; tourists in Flanders; EFL classrooms in China; hospitals and clinics in Japan; and a residential home and a hospital for the elderly in Belgium.

The curtain rises with two papers both of which at once problematise and inform our understanding of the notion of ‘context’ within intercultural education by acknowledging the embodied nature of intercultural experience. Katja Frimberger's paper explores the potential of drama within an intercultural pedagogy. In this she eschews a competence-based approach to intercultural education in favour of one which draws out her participants’ emotional and aesthetic experience of intercultural engagement. In order to achieve this, she draws on the technique of Verfremdungseffekt or ‘estrangement effect’ popularised by the polemical anti-fascist theatre of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (Brecht & Willett, 1964). Frimberger gives an account of a series of drama workshops that she initiated with a small group of international postgraduate students at the University of Glasgow. As the participants worked up their dramatised accounts of intercultural experience, the estrangement effect was used in order to provide a reflective commentary on the unfolding of narrative events, some of which were far from comfortable for the participants. However, these encounters enabled the participants to engage in critical reflection, and crucially, in an embodied experience of their intercultural experience. The paper is deliciously accompanied by sketches by Simon Bishopp, which capture the ways in which the participants engaged corporeally with quite simple props at key points in the enactment of the narrative. However, the paper ends on a cautionary note; for what can work with elite students exploring their intercultural experience in the relatively cosy context of a university auditorium might be very much more troubling for members of more vulnerable groups who have undergone even more traumatic transitions than the participants in this study. If Frimberger's international students in Scotland materially and corporeally act out the context in which their intercultural meanings are played out in performance, Najar's paper suggests provocatively that within intercultural research and education more generally participants are always agentively engaged with their contexts of learning and experience in ways which have often gone underacknowledged in our field. As part of a much larger scale mobile methods project, she pulls out data from one ‘guided walk’ in order to construct a path through which the reader can navigate their own way through this paper. The key argument is that context within intercultural research and education is often taken for granted as a kind of hinterland to the participants’ experience, with which they are in a passive relationship. Often intercultural learning is regarded as taking place in the relatively unresponsive confines of the language classroom. However, Najar argues powerfully that intercultural education is in need of a ‘new theory of space and place’. She proposes the term ‘intercultural field’ rather than ‘context’ to emphasise the dynamic and mutual engagement that learners have with the places in which learning takes place. She also suggests that the modernist notions of the nation-state upon which so many received theories of intercultural communication are based need to be superseded by understandings of place, belonging, culture and identity which are transnational in their reach.

If Frimberger and Najar describe how their participants explored their intercultural experience through performance and perambulation, Ahn's paper engages with the more microscopic exchange of intercultural meanings in language exchanges which take place between Korean and American students in the USA. However, here also, language exchange differs from mainstream pedagogic activities inasmuch as they are unpremeditated moments of engagement between two participants who are enabled to seek out their own learning opportunities to learn the language in which the other speaker is more proficient. In this respect, language exchanges give rise to a range of ‘affordances’ to learning the language of the other. Ahn uses conversation analysis and interview techniques in order to examine the ways in which the interaction within three Korean–English dyads gives rise to affordances for language and culture learning. Engaging in a close analysis of key interactions, Ahn confirms previous findings that dialogic engagement in itself does not automatically arise from these learning exchanges, but rather the learners have to actively seek out and co-create opportunities for learning. In this respect, the learners are actively involved in a process of learning which is built up over time.

One phenomenon that has arisen out of mobility within globalisation that we introduced at the top of this piece is what we could call ‘the globalised subject’ – not so much the ‘migrant’ who has left his or her country to work abroad, but the figure of the ‘returnee’. This figure has spent a substantial amount of time abroad but has then returned to their home country. This has featured before, though in no way exhaustively, in these pages. For example, Ford (2009) explored the ambiguous positions of Japanese university students who have come back having spent a significant part of their lives living abroad (‘kikokushijo’). It is well known that the border between Mexico and the USA is a particularly porous zone for economic migration. Mora, Trejo and Roux consider the learning trajectories of two groups of newly recruited language teachers who are teaching on applied linguistics programmes in Mexico. One group was recruited and educated locally, while the other group had studied in the USA and returned to Mexico to teach. In a gentle echo of Bonny Norton's groundbreaking work (Norton, 2000; Norton Pierce, 1995; see also Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), the authors report on the retrospective life-histories of six participants. These reveal the difference between the ways in which the identities of members of the different groups have been characterised: by stability on the part of the locally educated teachers and the relative fragmentation that is experienced by the returnees. The paper goes on to discuss the impact that these differences have on participants’ degrees of ‘investment’ in educational and work-related opportunities available to them in their contexts, and in particular those related to professional accreditation and language learning.

Attitudes towards a language are often viewed as an important marker of success in language learning, and the attitudes held by different social groups towards the different languages that are used in a society are also, crucially, constituent of a national culture (e.g. González-Riaño, Hevia-Artime, & Fernández-Costales, 2013; Huguet & Janés, 2008). This situation has also arguably become more complex as a result of the increase in economic migration within Europe over the past few decades. In this context, we are witnessing the revival and reinforcement of indigenous languages such as Breton, Catalan, Gaelic, Galician-Asturian, Irish and Welsh, in many cases as a result of the devolution in regional autonomy by national governments across the Continent. These issues inform two papers which investigate attitudes towards indigenous languages which are situated in a cultural context which features at least an ‘official’ national language as well as a variety of languages which are spoken by newly arrived migrants in the country or region. In the Republic of Ireland, although English is widely spoken, Irish remains the official language. Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes distinguish between the indigenous or ‘autochthonous’ Irish language and ‘allochthonous’ languages such as Polish, conventionally viewed as coming from elsewhere. However, as their paper goes on to reveal, the basis of this distinction is not unproblematic. Their investigation is a small-scale study which engages with qualitative data from focus groups made up of 15 university students in Ireland. Intriguingly, the outcomes of the study suggest that it is the newly arrived languages that appear to be regarded as in some way authentic, while participants appear to be decidedly ambivalent towards the status of the Irish language itself. While Irish is the official language throughout the Republic of Ireland, in Spain decentralisation has given rise to the revival of autochthonous regional languages such as Catalan. Furthermore, Catalonia has the largest number of foreign residents in Spain. So if anything, the language situation is even more complex than that in Ireland, as its multilingual culture features a mix of autochthonous, allochthonous and official languages (here, Spanish) – with the addition of English which also features in its role as the ‘global language’. This therefore creates challenges for schools as they work towards developing an appropriate environment for teaching and learning both Catalan to Spanish-speaking pupils, and Spanish to newly arrived youngsters. It is well known that learners’ attitudes towards the languages that they are taught have a considerable impact on the teaching and learning process – not least in terms of the degree of enjoyment but also on the outcomes of that learning experience itself. Madariaga, Huguet and Janét report on a large-scale government-backed survey which investigates the attitudes of students in Catalonian secondary schools towards four languages: Catalan, Spanish, English and the L1 of new arrivals. Here, attitudes towards the autochthonous language appeared less problematic than that in Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes’ study. Overall, students appeared to feel positive towards Catalan as well as the other languages and cultures, although it was noted that there could still be room for improvement. However, there was a difference between the local students and the immigrant group in as much as the former felt most favourably towards Catalan and the latter felt most favourably towards Spanish. If there was one point of concern, it was in the high proportion of ‘neutral’ students revealed by the questionnaire. Thus, while the indicators of this survey are generally favourable for the mutual coexistence and identifications of students from different backgrounds, the authors suggest that there could be wider implementation of educational interventions in order to enhance this coexistence through engaging the students more deeply in the emotional experience of being part of a multilingual and multicultural group. Considering both papers together, it also strikes us that it would be intriguing to consider why attitudes towards an autochthonous language should be ambivalent within one cultural context, and more positive in another.

Another aspect which arises from the increase in mobility which is arguably related to the current phase of globalisation is that of tourism. While the rich relationship between interculturality and tourism is habitually explored by our one of sister periodicals, the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, our association has made the occasional sortie into this area, particularly in its 2010 meeting at Leeds Metropolitan University, selected papers from which are published in the special issue of LAIC (11.4) Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World (O'Regan, Wilkinson, & Robinson, 2011), some of which inform our next paper. While much tourism research is carried through interviews, questionnaire research or ethnographic fieldwork, Patrick Goethals's paper takes a discursive approach to engage with a large corpus (n = 11,316) of hotel reviews written online by three groups of tourists, whose native languages are German, French and Spanish, respectively. This multilingual focus is a central contribution of this paper – for most analyses of this genre tend to engage only with reviews written in English. However here, guests and hosts from non-English-speaking countries can choose to either communicate in the local language, the tourists’ L1 or a ‘pivot language’ such as English. This study investigates not only the languages in which the participants choose to communicate, and the extent to which the issue of language and multilingual communication is made explicit within the texts, but also the particular attitudes displayed by participants towards the different languages. However, Goethals's theorisation of attitude differs from those of Atkinson & Kelly-Holmes and Madariaga, above, in as much as he situates it within the ‘face model of language choice’ (O'Driscoll, 2001). The study's central claim is that spontaneous language reports differ considerably in terms of the point of view expressed according to the language group of the tourists. Furthermore, the topic that appears most relevant to participants is the tourists’ mother tongue, with English as lingua franca being of only peripheral concern in the reviews under scrutiny.

Given that students worldwide have to display evidence of their language proficiency in order to participate in international mobility, it often falls on us to engage with the issue of intercultural competence, often the gatekeeper to education in another country or to international employment. While there has been extensive focus on the development of intercultural competence within the European Union – indeed the EU has been a distinct laboratory for various projects in our field – to date there have been far fewer IC initiatives reported from China. Gu's large-scale survey therefore reflects the emerging concern in China with intercultural communicative language teaching (ICLT) and its outcome – intercultural communicative competence (ICC, after Byram, 1997). Gu reports on a nationwide survey in order to investigate Chinese English language teachers’ perceptions of assessment in ICC. Findings suggest that while most of China's EFL teachers surveyed hold a positive attitude towards ICC assessment, only a few actually implement it in their classrooms. Intercultural communication appears still to be viewed as subordinate to language learning and, where it is taken up, learning about culture takes the form of learning a static body of knowledge about Anglophone cultures. The study concludes by advising a ramping up of the intercultural focus of official curricular policies and the provision of appropriate training, particularly for trainee teachers. However in the end, for Gu it is down to the Chinese teachers themselves, who are exhorted to monitor changes in their own beliefs and practices through keeping a journal, drawing up case studies and engaging in personal reflection.

The last two papers in this issue engage with quite distinctive ways in which intercultural communication take place in medical settings. There is already a voluminous literature which explores the communication which takes place in medical settings where asymmetries of power exist between the medical professional who is often a member of the ‘dominant culture’ and a speaker of the authorised language, and a long-term sojourner who is often undergoing considerable economic hardship and not that conversant in the national language (e.g. Baraldi & Luppi, 2015). There are however, very few studies in which that relationship is equalised, or even reversed. Nathaniel Simmons’ paper samples from a larger case study project in order to consider what happens to 10 ‘western’ Assistant English Language Teachers (ALTs), mostly young Americans, when they visit the doctor in Japan. While we are usually resistant to the use of homogenising cultural descriptors such as ‘western’ or ‘eastern’, Simmons justifies its use in this case since it was made salient by the participants themselves. Using Donal Carbaugh's framework of Cultural Discourse Analysis (2005, 2007), Simmons finds that these more culturally empowered participants are often sensitive to the differences between the way in which modern medicine is practised in Japan and their home countries, usually the USA. This is regularly expressed through negative evaluative comments using markers of place such as ‘back home’ and ‘here’, and evaluative epithets to refer to and ‘good’ and bad’ medical providers. Among other things, this study reveals that ‘territorial demarcations of place and space’ contribute to the evaluation that these relatively privileged medical subjects make of their medical providers. Yet, despite the ‘cultural capital’ carried by these young American language teachers, neither party in the medical encounters that were negatively evaluated renders the (mis)communication visible. Simmons concludes with a plea for development of skills in intercultural awareness and intercultural communication on the part of both expatriate ALTs and doctors in the host country. Yet as we are finding, after 40 years of research into the field, progress in these matters both nationally and internationally appears to be moving at the pace of the proverbial snail.

Finally, Van De Mieroop's paper brings together the analysis of two as yet largely unexplored settings: triadic interactions between specialist doctors, interpreters and Russian-speaking patients in a hospital in Antwerp; and even more uniquely, interpreted interactions from a residential home in Limburg, a town in Belgium where some inhabitants are elderly first-generation immigrants from Italy. The focus of her paper makes a contribution in two ways. The first of these lies in the nuanced combinations of data-sets which she analyses. But also, importantly, her study focuses not so much on the on-the-record triadic exchanges between patient, interpreter and medical professional – but upon the ‘small talk’ that is carried out alongside the main business of the consultation. Drawing on a fine-grained analysis of her data that combines the discourse analysis with conversation analysis, Van De Mieroop concludes with a number of observations about the role of small talk in these triadic medical interactions. Not least, small talk was often the way in which the interpreters (co-) created an active role for themselves in the interaction and enabled them to become empowered in the interaction. The paper also nicely brings out the ‘messiness’ of real-life interpretation, which Van De Mieroop suggests can be better defined as ‘consisting of multilingual and multi-layered participation framework, with dynamically shifting roles for all the interlocutors’.

Our next issue, the third of this volume, will be guest-edited by Ana Beaven and Claudia Borghetti and is entitled Teaching the intercultural in contexts of student mobility. This will feature selected papers from conferences held on Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers (IEREST). Also, the call is now out for abstracts to be submitted for the 16th annual conference of the (IALIC). Its theme is Bridging across languages and cultures in everyday lives: new roles for changing scenarios and it will take place at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from 25–27h November. Details of the call for LAIC 2016 are available at http://ialic2016bcn.com/. Selected papers from the conference will be published in LAIC 18.1. We invite contributors to the current issue, and prospective contributors to the journal, to join us in Barcelona.

Finally, we extend our sincere thanks to Melinda Dooly for her stalwart service as Reviews Editor over the past six years. Since 2010 she has succeeded in reinvigorating the reviews section of this journal. She is stepping aside to focus on the arrangements for the Barcelona conference, but will remain on the Editorial Board.