Applied Linguistics in “dialogue” with hermeneutics in discoursing “the intercultural” in educational praxis

Abstract

Ever since the Socratic-Platonic inquiry on the nature of language, linguistic and socio-cultural thinking in Eurocentric academic cultures about human communication has been discoursed from various philosophical perspectives based on diverse conceptualisations, perceptions, understandings, notions, theories, descriptions and explanations of the variable phenomena observed in intra- and intercultural interaction and communication. In the variable research areas of applied linguistics ‘scholars from a variety of disciplines have applied themselves to defining what the nature of intercultural communication might be and how it might be taught’ (Kramsch, 2002, p. 277). However, in the concerted effort to apply our understanding of “the intercultural” in our research and educationalpraxis, we ‘have no other recourse but discourse itself – the discourse of [our] discipline, laid out on the page as disciplinary truth. And that, as James Clifford (Clifford, 1988) would say, is the “predicament of culture”’ (Kramsch, 2002, p. 282). In the following essay, this “predicament” is examined in the contexts of the discourse tradition which centres on “dialogue” as a valued means of understanding self-and-otherintra-and-inter-culturally. Discussion will focus on how “dialogue” can impose “situated/positioned” ways of interpreting and understanding “the intercultural” in languages education, especially when it defers engaging with variable-linguisticalityand variable-traditionalityin its discourse tradition.