Editorial

Abstract

In the first issue of this volume (LAIC 19.1), as we caught up with the delegates who trekked to the IALIC conference held in Edinburgh in the summer of 2017, we explored the metaphor of ‘Third Space’ (after Bhabha, 1994). As we saw back in January, this trope can be used in research into intercultural communication either to symbolise the hybrid identities of those who are straddling two or more ‘cultures’, or to represent a synthetic, hermeneutic zone in which texts from one ‘culture’ are (re)interpreted in the context of ‘another culture’ to generate new and potentially transgressive meanings. In this second issue of the year, we return to possibly more familiar territory for some readers of these pages. As a journal which focuses on language and intercultural communication we necessarily reflect contemporary research which investigates not only the ways in which different languages and cultures are used in social situations and mobilised as the cornerstone of subjects’ identities, but also the ways in which these languages and cultures are acquired in both formal and non-formal settings. In this, the mission of the journal and the Association has, as I see it, an educational dimension which embraces some of the origins of the field (e.g. Byram, 1989; see also Martin, Nakayama, & Carbaugh, 2013). Thus in this first ‘open’ issue of Volume 19, we return somewhat to origins to present a collection of papers which relate for the most part to some aspect of intercultural pedagogy, finishing off with a challenging exploration of the interactions that take place in business meetings. What is conspicuous about these papers is the range of different contexts and approaches which are represented: the continuing hegemony – and indeed ‘racialisation’ – of the ‘native speaker’ in language classrooms in the global South (Khan); ‘communicative language teaching’ and ‘traditional Chinese language teaching’ (Clark-Gareca and Min Gui); a ‘discourse approach’ to teaching culture (Gyogi); ‘community schools’ for the children of Chinese migrants living in the UK (Ganassin); ‘intercultural training’ in the workplace (Barakos); and ‘discursive leadership’ (Chan and Du-Babcock). The striking thing about these six papers is how each of their pedagogic contexts/ discursive approaches is conventionally presented as hermetically sealed – each with their own literatures, narratives, practices and contexts – although the aspiration for, and the exercise of, some sort of intercultural communication is a thread which remains common to each. As Elisabeth Barakos brings out explicitly in her paper, the specific realisation of intercultural pedagogy at any one moment is embedded in the specific social and institutional conditions in which the activity is carried out. It is over twenty years since Claire Kramsch and Michael Byram crystallised their respective critiques of the hegemonic position of native speaker norms in language teaching and learning (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1997). And indeed meetings held in Leeds Metropolitan University in the late 1990s on ‘Intercultural Capability’ travelled in part in the pedagogical and intellectual slipstream of these developments towards the end of the 20c. (http://ialic.international/ about-ialic/ialic-history/). However – as any of us who have taught courses on language teaching methodology will recognise – twenty years later, such standards remain entrenched within the teaching of many different languages, and perhaps most especially English. Our first paper, by Cristine Khan, reprises some of the issues around ‘native-speakerism’ and reviews the ways in which this argument has developed over the intervening period, embedding it in her own personal biography and identity. Colombia, like many countries in the Global South, has apparently developed programmes to improve bilingual education in English and Spanish within its educational system. Drawing on a carefully documented series of formal and informal interviews with undergraduates studying modern languages in Colombian universities, Khan concludes that hegemonic discourses maintain a ‘racialized figure’ of the