Intercultural Competence

In this article, we first examine the concept of intercultural competence and the related concept of intercultural communicative competence. In Europe, the key documents are the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. In the USA, a parallel development led to the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. These are perspectives from the “Global North” which have had influence beyond their geographical and intellectual boundaries, and we analyse education policy and curriculum documents from different countries and regions to understand if, and how, intercultural competence has influenced or helped to shape the values and objectives present in different education systems either implicitly or explicitly. The education systems that we refer to are from North Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. In a third phase, we consider differing perspectives on intercultural competence, from a “Global South” perspective, the critique of the reproduction of Western-centric knowledge and calls for “intercultural translations” to establish a relationship between different types of knowledge. There is a need to analyse and evaluate education values and objectives from different education systems to establish the relevance of intercultural competence as a type of knowledge. Fourthly we discuss and reference the ways in which the concept of intercultural (communicative) competence has been used in practice in language teaching and learning, and other areas of curricula. Finally, we consider current research related to the concept in different contexts and what future research needs we believe are important.