Abstract Australia’s language-in-education policy documents have consistently included references to the place of ‘culture’ in language teaching. This paper seeks to examine how the major national policies conceptualise culture and interculturality in relation to languages education. For each policy, this study will analyse the language focus, the conceptualisation of the relationship between language and culture, the contexts in which the policy envisages cultural knowledge will be relevant, and the overall educative vision for language and culture learning. From these analyses it can be seen that successive policy documents have shifted the domain and purpose of interculturality and have constructed views of interculturality that are increasingly instrumentaly focused. The policies show a transformation from a humanistically focused construction of education and a view of languages as relevant to diversity, to an economically focused construction of education and a view of languages as capital for economic deployment. At the same time, they have preserved a largely static, information-focused construction of culture which is not consistent with the user-oriented policy goals.
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