Editorial

Despite attempts of delegates at successive IALIC conferences over the past 25 years to dispel the convenient assumption of a one-to-one equivalence between ‘nationality’ and ‘culture’, the existence of ‘the nation’ has never been denied: simply that they come into being as discursively produced semiotic systems rather than as homogeneous psychological tendencies shared by members of the populace. As such, these symbolic systems of nationhood provide ‘cultural resources’ with which each member of the populace can interact agentively to create their cultural identities (Holliday, 2010). Recent symbolic acts of resistance to narratives of nationhood which incorporate the celebration of slavery that have been carried out by members of the Black Lives Matter movement exemplify the ways in which cultural identities can be reordered (MacDonald, 2024). Thus, cultural resources are always on the move. One thing that distinguishes them at any point in time is brought about by their ‘global positioning’ in relation to other cultures (Holliday, 2019, p. 4), or as our first author, Corinne Painter, states in the abstract of her paper: ‘ … by who and what is included and who and what is excluded’. While one hopes that in democratic societies these ‘inclusions and exclusions’ are brought about through the exercise of reasoned debate on the part of the elected representatives of the people, this is increasingly giving way to the strident and often irrational rhetoric of different forms of media. However as our opening paper in this issue demonstrates, this is not a recent phenomenon. While different forms of social media have recently become well established as a focus of both popular concern and academic scrutiny (e.g. Koh & De Fina, 2023), arguably more traditional outlets such as national newspapers still play an important role in forming national opinion and in serving as a weathervane to elected representatives and their political parties.

For some time, it has struck us as something of a shortcoming in our field that almost all of the research papers we publish focus upon the present experiences of intercultural communication in all its different manifestations, i.e. for empirical papers their datasets have mostly been collected within the past five years or so. To the best of our knowledge, the only exception to this has been Jorge Marco’s delicious (2021) study of ethnic and linguistic diversity in the French resistance movement in World War II. Our opening article in this issue, by Corinne Painter, considers a series of past events which came to symbolise Britain’s global positioning within Europe, and with Germany in particular, through the 1990s and early 2000s. Her study examines how British identity was discursively produced, transmitted and reproduced in British newspaper articles featuring German Formula One driver, Michael Schumacher. Painter carries out a Thematic Analysis of a corpus of articles drawn from widely read, predominantly right-wing, UK newspapers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, as well as the more liberal broadsheet The Guardian, through two time periods: 1991–2006, and 2010–2012. This reveals that Schumacher’s public persona is constructed in the press as focusing predominantly upon three rather spurious characteristics: his arrogance, wealth and dangerous driving –in part echoing jingoistic tropes from the discourse of the Second World War. For Painter, this narrative appears in stark contrast to more intimate encounters, with even the notoriously ‘laddish’ right-wing pundit and erstwhile presenter of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, who, Painter reports, once described Schumacher much more cordially as a ‘humorous and family-focused man’. Painter argues that these public representations of Schumacher tell us nothing about the man himself, and everything about the crisis in British identity that was taking place over this period. For a politically rudderless Britain was still labouring under the ideological backwash that ensued from the collapse of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in 1990; with the ‘New’ Labour Party in the process of being reconstituted under Tony Blair to embrace predominantly neoliberal economic policies in response to the new ideologies of European detente and pan-national ‘globalisation’ (Fairclough, 2000).

Adrian Holliday is also credited in our next paper for his 2006 reification of the concept of ‘native-speakerism’. However, on our reading widespread critique of the predominance of the ‘native speaker’ in language education can be traced back another couple of decades – at least to the work of Claire Kramsch (1998) and Michael Byram (1997). At first sight, native-speakerism might appear to be language education’s corollary of the discursive construction of nationalism, outlined above by Painter. However, as our next paper – a review of the continued phenomenon of ‘native-speakerism’ in English language teaching in Japan – very usefully clarifies, the direction of travel of these two phenomena has become differentiated over the past 30 years. While the discourse of nationalism remains endogenous, the discourse of native-speakerism appears to have become exogenous (see, e.g. Fritz & Sandu, 2020; Simmons, 2016). And in our experience this is not just limited to Japan. For Malcolm, this was attested by his experience of a lengthy and rather heated exchange with a group of experienced international ELT teachers in a postgraduate Methodology class in the UK. When he naively stood up to dismiss the concept of ‘native-speakerism’, unexpectedly this group of astute and critically-minded students rose up as one and insisted that ‘native-speaker’ English was not only what their employers stipulated, but also what their students had to learn in order to ‘get on’ in a globalised world. And for Hans, local students in postcolonial university classrooms in Hong Kong, while not dismissing the potential of Hong Kong English as an identity marker (Ladegaard & Chan, 2023), would regularly insist that RP and other forms of Standard British or American English are ‘better’ and ‘safer’ models of pronunciation because they would provide them with more prestige and recognition in Hong Kong and beyond.

On this argument, while countries such as the UK now try rather self-consciously to embrace the ethic of multiculturalism by acknowledging the diversity of Englishes both within its own nations and regions and further afield, as explored elsewhere in these pages, many English language speakers globally still hold native-speaker linguistic norms in high regard (e.g. Tajeddin, Alemi & Pashmforoosh, 2018). One of the trajectories which Christopher Samuell insightfully pulls out in our next paper is the shift that took place from the ‘linguistically puritanical’ adherence to Standard English in the ‘expanding circle’, which was still being advocated as late as 1990 by prominent linguists such Randolph Quirk, to what Nobuyuki Hino now calls ‘post-native-speakerism’ (2021). This also gives the lie to Phillipson’s well-known concept of ‘linguistic imperialism’. However attractive Phillipson’s theory might still seem to surviving soixante-huiters who grew up in the lee of a Marxist political philosophy, on Samuell’s argument the dynamic of native-speakerism would now appear much more complex in its origin than a plot to maintain cultural hegemony, which is initiated by the UK Foreign Office and US State Department and exercised through their educational and cultural proxies. It is beyond Samuell’s brief in this study to speculate beyond the policy of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, however it is iindeed plausible in part that the ideology of the native speaker does remain alive and well through a continued preference for ‘nativism’ in applicants who are interviewed by global multinationals, and perhaps also the global influence of movies and popular music. Although even the cultural sphere does not shy away nowadays from representing the more extreme manifestations of Australasian, American and British English, such as characters who speak with a ‘Texan drawl’, and with ‘broad’ Australian or Glaswegian accents.

From the critiques of native-speakerism through the 1990s emerged the challenge of finding an antidote. This was hinted at early on in Henry Widdowson’s well-known critique of the still widespread use of ‘native-speaker English’ as a standard (1994). In a speech first delivered to the 1993 TESOL Convention, Widdowson stated that what is needed for English as a Foreign Language is ‘an enquiry into the nature of the subject we are teaching, what constitutes an appropriate approach, [and] what kinds of competence is required of teachers’ (p. 389). Just such a project was developed in Vienna through the noughties in a series of papers and presentations by Barbara Seidlhofer, who proposed the construction of a corpus of English which ‘is chosen as the means of communication among people from different first language backgrounds’ (Seidlhofer, 2005, p. 339). Thus, the project of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) was first conceived as a tightly framed, empirically grounded, linguistic enquiry in order to ‘prove’ the systematicity of the varieties of English as used amongst speakers for whom it is a foreign language. Since then, the claims made for ELF have become considerably more wide-ranging (e.g. Baker, 2015, 2022), as is evidenced in our next paper by Milene Mendes de Oliveira. As part of the Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively project, Mendes de Oliveira analyses a sequence from a database created from the participation of speakers of different languages in the online simulation game Megacities, devised by Jürgen Bolten (2015). From the interaction between the players, it would appear that the participants deploy pragmatic conventions similar to those used in conversations between ‘native’ L1 speakers. Furthermore, the patterns of linguistic and social interaction displayed by group members serve to produce and reproduce novel sets of conventions between them, which Mendes de Oliveira argues is akin to a ‘culture’. These similarities between the pragmatic conventions of L1 and ELF speakers would appear as little surprise to Widdowson and Seidlhofer, who themselves have argued recently that ‘it is questionable whether those that ELF users encounter are of a different kind and so warrant conceiving ELF (and other lingua franca) communication as of a different order from the intra-communal communication of L1 users’ (2022, p. 461). However, for these original proponents of ELF, its function as intercultural communication appears far from self-evident:

From the perspective of the ELF users themselves, what they are doing is not engaging in intercultural and multilingual communication, but trying to get their meaning across and achieve their objective as best they can. (Widdowson and Seidlhofer, 2022, p. 463)

Rather, Widdowson and Seidlhofer propose that even for those who out of necessity have to fall back on English as shared means of communication, ‘[w]hat comes into contact in acts of communication … are the unique schematic configurations of individual mindsets, each representing personal territorial identity … ’ (p. 462). While we remain committed to publishing papers in this journal which explore the intersection between interculturality and a wide range of topics, including ELF, our view remains that – ideological concerns apart (O’Regan, 2014) – it should not be assumed that the use of English as a shared foreign language necessarily entails intercultural communication.

It is 30 years now since the notions of the Third Space (Bhabha, 1994) and the third place (Kramsch, 1993) became popularised within language education, in part heralding in the embedding of intercultural communication within the language teaching curriculum in Europe and the US. Despite the fact the Kramsch has long since proposed that the more bounded concepts of ‘third place’ or ‘third culture’ be superseded by the more open-ended idea of ‘symbolic competence’ (2009/2013), the idea of ‘thirdness’ has continued to attract interest within these pages (e.g. Hidalgo, 2001; Holliday, 2022; McKinley et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2023); and not least in the call for the 2016 IALIC conference (Zhou & Pilcher, 2019a). However, as our next contributor argues, with the possible exception of Zhou and Pilcher (2019b), there are few accounts of specific pedagogical approaches which have been mobilised in the language classroom to ‘facilitate a transformative third perspective’ on the part of students. This is precisely what our next paper goes on to investigate within the relatively novel context of a tertiary-level language class in China, where Fang maintains a ‘target language teaching approach’ still maintains a monolithic view of ‘Western culture’. Fang proposes a theoretical framework for intercultural praxis which not only supersedes the binary exclusivity of C1 and C2, but also incorporates a ‘“humanising pedagogy,” which emphasises the well-rounded development of a person’s body, mind and morality’ (after Delport, 2016). Drawing on inductive analysis of questionnaires and interviews with teachers and students alike, Fang demonstrates in detail how a five-stage pedagogical approach was implemented in order to ‘decentre cultural imperialism’, and to promote in students ‘plural values and behaviours and intercultural thinking and knowing from a critical stance’.

As well as encouraging debates in cultural studies and interculturality in language education, for some time now IALIC has with some urgency embraced the problematisation of the dominance of post-Enlightenment epistemologies within the arts and human sciences (Guilherme, 2023; Marcelín-Alvarado et al., 2021; Phipps, 2007; R’boul, 2021; S. Thiago, 2006; Yohannes et al., 2023; Zhou, 2022; Zhou & Ladegaard, 2024). Since the turn of the millennium, this line of critique has become well established in the human sciences due to the often polemical interventions of scholars such as Walter Mignolo (e.g. 2011, 2012), Catherine Walsh (e.g. 2015, 2018; see also 2021) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (e.g. 2014, 2018; see also Phipps, 2007); and through the last quarter of a century, the inter-epistemic debate has sharpened in focus to become a major preoccupation of LAIC and other progressive organs for research in intercultural studies. While our concluding paper is also set in a Chinese university, Tian Xiaowen and Fred Dervin take a rather different epistemological tack to Fang, by proposing the Confucian concept of Zhongyong 中庸 as an analytical framework for global intercultural research, which they translate as ‘the Golden Mean’. Their study focuses on data collected from two diverse focus groups of art students who were working together on a project. This required them to design an everyday object which used an artistic visual design derived stylistically from one particular ethnic (or ‘Minzu’) group, which they had to negotiate amongst themselves. In order to establish how successfully members of each diverse group collaborated interculturally on their project, Tian and Dervin propose a ‘cycle of Zhongyong’. This groups the key tenets of the Confucian philosophy under three superordinate headings: ‘“inner appeal” (focus on self), “collective balance” (focus on the middle course between self and other), [and] “negotiate change” (focus on adaptation to change)’. Not least this allows the authors to establish which aspects of interculturality were more or less ingenuous on the part of members of the different groups; it also reveals how asymmetric power relations within each group influenced members’ capacity for intercultural change and transformation. On the face of this study, Zhongyong appears to offer a plausible ‘post-abyssal’ framework for intercultural pedagogy and research (after Santos, 2014, 2018). However, we wonder if the principles of Zhongyong could be incorporated into intercultural studies because of the potential insights it offers for emancipation and bon accord, rather than being tacked onto a neoliberal lexicon as a novel form of evaluation for ‘intercultural competence’.

To round off this issue, we are extremely grateful to Flavia Monceri, Professor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences at Università degli Studi del Molise, for taking the time to review a recent collection of papers brought together by Bianca Boteva-Richter, Sarhan Dhouib and James Garrison, Political Philosophy from an Intercultural Perspective Power Relations in a Global World, published by Routledge.