From ‘Intercultural Speaker’ to ‘Intercultural Reader’: A Proposal to Reconceptualize Intercultural Communicative Competence Through a Focus on Literary Reading

Abstract

This chapter explores how literary reading may contribute to a reconceptualization of intercultural competence as an educational goal through a focus on conflict, ambiguity and imagination. According to hermeneutic theory and the reader reception tradition of literary theory, the process of interpreting a text is a dialogical, negotiative experience that leads to a gradual expansion of the reader’s perspective. From this viewpoint, the reading of Foreign Language (FL) literature may be regarded as a form of intercultural communication. With a basis in Byram’s model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and the concept of the ‘intercultural speaker’, the chapter focuses on what distinguishes reading from real-time communication in order to define the qualities of a profoundly engaged, analytical and imaginative ‘intercultural reader’. A descriptive model of ‘the intercultural reader’s’ engagement with FL literature is proposed. This model shows how the text interpretation process may operate at three, interlinked levels of communication, each of which involves the ‘intercultural reader’s’ emotions as well as her cognition. At all three levels, she considers the effects of the narrative style and structure of the text as well as the cultural, social and historical subject positions of text(s) and reader(s). Furthermore, the chapter shows how the text interpretation process may take place across notions of time and place, involving varying degrees of critical and abstract thinking. It also provides a practical example of how the fostering of such ‘intercultural readers’ may take place in the FL classroom. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on aspects of the reader-FL text relationship on which Byram’s model of ICC, as well as other theoretical perspectives on reading and intercultural competence, are unclear. Finally, it brings attention to the complexities of intercultural communication and the need to promote young individuals’ ability to handle conflict and ambivalence in a constructive, creative manner.