Preface to the Special Issue: Interculturalism in Second Language Teaching

This is the edited volume related to the broad but interesting thematic area of “Interculturalism in Second Language Teaching”. The multilingual and multicultural panorama of the current world intensifies the need for placing interculturalism at the center of the research and teaching activity. Especially, in classrooms with linguistic and cultural diversity, interculturalism should be promoted as a source of teaching and learning while important research has been carried out towards investigating the contribution of interculturalism to second language teaching practices. Within this context of linguistic and cultural diversity, students are encouraged to develop their intercultural competences, so that they can be prepared to act in a diverse world. In particular, students should develop their intercultural sensitivity and awareness, which can help them to realise and appreciate the differentiations among people from different cultures and achieve mutual understanding. In this way, they are aimed to also develop their intercultural communication strategies, which are proposed by the Council of Europe as important mechanisms for facilitating the communication and co-existence of people in multilingual and multicultural environment and they can be of great help for students’ interactions and exchanges in a classroom. Students need to develop such competences of communication, participation and interaction which can facilitate their work and activity within a classroom with students from different countries, while such competences can be extremely important for them later in life.