Meta-pragmatic Awareness and Intercultural Competence: The Role of Reflection and Interpretation in Intercultural Mediation

Abstract

Previous models of intercultural competence that have been influential in foreign language education have tended to treat language competencies and intercultural competencies as separate components. Although language competencies are seen as a requirement for communicating across cultures, language is more or less positioned as a neutral ‘tool’ for ‘bridging’ cultural differences. This chapter takes a pragmatics perspective on intercultural mediation, considering the role of meta-pragmatic awareness in shaping the interpretation of language in use across cultural boundaries. The chapter examines instances of language learners’ attempts at intercultural mediation in the form of reflective commentaries on their processes of sense-making in relation to pragmatic phenomena across languages. Such instances of interpretation show that meta-pragmatic awareness functions as an important resource for drawing together cultural understandings from multiple languages and constructing creative solutions to intercultural problems. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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