Review Intercultural competence and pragmatics (book review)

Gila A. Schauer’s Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics arrives at a moment when the fields of applied linguistics and language pedagogy are still negotiating how to articulate the relationship between pragmatic knowledge and the broader, and often vaguely invoked, notion of intercultural competence. Although both constructs have been circulating for decades, they have often moved alongside one another without fully meeting: one rooted in the close study of how people use language in context, the other gradually taking on ideas from education policy, cultural studies and social psychology. Schauer’s study brings these two strands into direct conversation by shifting the focus to those who arguably mediate this relationship most actively – modern foreign language teachers working in higher education. The book is anchored in a substantial survey of 133 instructors teaching fifteen languages, a group whose daily classroom decisions influence learners’ expectations of what it means to use a language appropriately in intercultural settings. What Schauer offers is an empirically grounded account of how teachers themselves interpret the essence and conceptual frameworks of intercultural competence, which linguistic elements they fold into it, and how explicitly they perceive its ties to pragmatic competence. This teacher-centred perspective proves particularly valuable given that, for many students, university language courses are the final stage of formal instruction before they find themselves negotiating meaning in multilingual and multicultural contexts without institutional support.