Critical Interculturality in language learning: Plurilingualism for problematising and enriching the notion

This chapter starts from the observation that the very term of intercultural is polysemic and multifaceted in different languages and economic-political contexts, with some aspects intersecting in research and education. Who intercultural refers to and what it entails are not universally accepted in our glocalized educational worlds. Over the past decade, I have used the notion of interculturality to problematize intercultural communication as both a daily phenomenon and as an object of research and education. Increasingly, instead of trying to identify how to ‘do’ interculturality ‘best’ through education, my interest has been in how to reflect on, clarify and improve the ways we communicate around interculturality in research and education to ensure further epistemic diversities and justice. I have argued that a lot of the problems that have been noted in language and intercultural communication education might not only derive from ‘culture difference’, ‘essentialism’ and/or ‘clashes of cultures’ but also from our tendency to disregard and exclude the plurilingual complexity of constructing such a polysemic and unstable notion in both research and education. The chapter thus reviews what plurilingualism itself can do to raise wider awareness of this epistemic and methodological problem in language learning and what ‘good’ it could do to language and intercultural communication as an everyday phenomenon. I provide examples of current practices and innovations that call for further exploration of this underexplored but essential aspect of plurilingual and intercultural language learning.