The Language Learning Journal

ISSN: 0957-1736 (Print) 1753-2167 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rllj20

Developing general cultural awareness in a

monocultural English as a foreign language
context in a Mexican university: a wiki-based
critical incident approach
Paola Trejo Vences & Richard Fay
To cite this article: Paola Trejo Vences & Richard Fay (2015) Developing general cultural
awareness in a monocultural English as a foreign language context in a Mexican university:
a wiki-based critical incident approach, The Language Learning Journal, 43:2, 222-233, DOI:
10.1080/09571736.2013.858549
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2013.858549

Published online: 16 Dec 2013.

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Date: 03 November 2016, At: 02:18

The Language Learning Journal, 2015

Vol. 43, No. 2, 222233, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2013.858549

Developing general cultural awareness in a monocultural English as a

foreign language context in a Mexican university: a wiki-based critical
incident approach
Paola Trejo Vencesa and Richard Fayb*
a
Academic Bridge Program, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; bManchester
Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK

This article explores what the intercultural turn might mean in the case of teaching
English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). The discussion is contextualised in
what has been termed the expanding circle of English and focuses on an English as
a foreign language (EFL) class in a Mexican university, a context where the full
implications of a shift from EFL to English as a lingua franca (ELF) have yet to be
addressed. We consider how the intercultural turn might be understood in this
Mexican context and then present the rationale for, and design of, a technology-based
(wiki) extra-curricular pilot project which adopted less of an EFL/cultural and more
of an ELF/intercultural approach. We evaluate the evidence from this small-scale
project in terms of students developing general cultural awareness and suggest that
this type of project, an example of the intercultural turn, might be more widely
applicable in similar expanding circle EFL contexts.

Introduction
Over the last three decades, foreign language education has seen signicant cultural and
intercultural turns. These turns, and the moves within them (Fay and Davcheva 2005:
147), tend to manifest themselves differently at specic times, in particular contexts and
within the various language teaching specialisms (Fay and Androulakis 2011). Our discussion here considers these turns, and especially the most recent, from the perspective of a
small-scale teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) project situated
in a Mexican university.
Such intercultural turns within TESOL have been partly shaped by the discussions of
the complexities of the global English language phenomenon and the teaching implications
of these complexities. These discussions were clearly evident in the 1980s (e.g. Kachru
1982; Quirk and Widdowson 1985) and the 1990s (e.g. Graddol 1997; Pennycook
1994); but the ow has intensied in this century (e.g. Archibald, Cogo and Jenkins
2011; Holliday 2005; Jenkins 2000, 2007; McKay 2002; McKay and Bokhorst-Heng
2008; Ryan 2012; Sharian 2009; Sifakis 2004). Current debates about, for example, teaching English as an international language/lingua franca and about the potential of the English
language classroom for developing multicultural awareness (Fay, Lytra and Ntavaliagkou

*Corresponding author. Email: richard.fay@manchester.ac.uk

2013 Association for Language Learning

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2010; Sifakis and Fay 2011) build upon earlier debates about the intercultural role of
English (e.g. Baxter 1983). Although other foreign language specialisms do consider
such issues (e.g. Bernaus et al. 2012; Risager 2007), the enduring nature of these discussions in TESOL make it an interesting case vis--vis the cultural and intercultural turns
in foreign language education more generally.
Our discussion builds upon earlier work (Trejo 2010) as extended through our reections on the experience of developing and evaluating students cultural awareness
through an interculturally oriented curriculum enrichment pilot project for TESOL students.
The article begins by describing the Mexican context and then outlines some design considerations before presenting the project itself. Next, we present the main ndings from
our analysis of project-related data. We conclude by considering the value of this kind of
project for students and their likely use of English for intercultural communication in
Mexico and beyond.

The project in context

The Mexican context
Mexico is linguistically diverse with 60+ ofcially recognised indigenous languages (e.g.
Nhuatl, Maya and Mixteca). Nonetheless, Spanish is the rst language for over 90% of
Mexicans and is the main medium of communication within society. Since the Second
World War, Mexicos close geographic, economic and cultural ties with the USA have
led to English becoming the most studied foreign language in the country.
The students involved in our project are young Spanish-speaking, urban Mexicans from
broadly similar cultural backgrounds and their English language learning experiences take
place in this largely monocultural, Spanish-speaking, Mexican context for learning English
as a foreign language (EFL). However, in the increasingly globalised and technologydriven world in which these lower-intermediate EFL students now participate, English
often has more personal and professional functions for them than the EFL label suggests.
In this regard, they are similar to English language learners and users in many other
parts of Kachrus (1985) expanding circle of English; see, for example, Sifakis (2009)
discussion of the Greek EFL context.
In 1993, the Ministry of Education (Secretaria de Educacion Publica [SEP]) introduced
a new, communicative EFL curriculum (SEP 2006) for Mexican state schools. At that time,
the cultural dimension in EFL teaching was also being widely discussed as part of the cultural turn. For example, at university level, Zoreda (1994) argued for the use of popular
anglophone (mainly US) culture as a source of enriching encounters for English language
learners. Her suggestion linked English as a target foreign language to specic foreign cultures (i.e. those of the anglophone world).
The students in our project are most familiar with this orientation to EFL learning. In
terms of foreign language education thinking, their EFL experiences have been largely
shaped by an approach in which the target language is explicitly linked to a target
culture rather than to the linguistic-cultural complexities of our global era. This distinction
can be understood in terms of Risagers (2007) national versus transnational paradigms in
foreign language teaching. More broadly, in terms of intercultural training terminology
(Brislin, Landis and Brandt 1983), their learning takes place within a culture/contextspecic approach.
The 2006 revision of the 1993 curriculum added what can be viewed as the English as a
lingua franca (ELF) objective of preparing students for communicating with non-native-

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P. Trejo Vences and R. Fay

speakers of English. This revised curriculum aims to enable learners to participate in

certain social practices of language, both oral and written, in their own or in a foreign
country in contact with native and non-native speakers of English and also to recognise
and respect the differences and similarities between their own and the foreign culture
(SEP 2006: 13).
This ELF addition, and wider focus beyond anglophone cultures, forms part of what we
see as the intercultural turn in Mexican TESOL. However, an ELF intercultural dimension
was often implicit in the 1990s articulation of the cultural turn. For example, Zoreda (1994:
4) argued that graduates needed to become intercultural literates and to be able to engage
with other cultures and at the same time appreciate their own (4). Similar discussions
(Hidalgo, Cifuentes and Flores 1996: 113) considered how the 1990s curricular thinking
positioned English as a foreign language but also as a necessary communicational response
to the challenges and demands of a globalised world.
The project context
Public universities in Mexico typically offer extra-curricular English language classes supporting the study of other academic areas taught in English. The university language centre
in which our project was piloted was established in the 1960s as a response to English
becoming the most widely used language for international exchanges and the international
spread of technological and scientic information (i.e. more of an ELF than EFL rationale).
Most current language centre students are drawn from the international business and commercial trade programmes, both of which seek to prepare professionals with highly developed intercultural and competitive skills recognised at a national and international level
(our translation of the current departmental website).
However, notwithstanding the ELF focus in both the centres rationale and the aims of
these programmes, we would, based on the rst authors experiences as both an EFL student
and teacher in the language centre, characterise the centres pedagogy as still largely
anchored in an EFL approach. For example, for advanced level students, a key learning
objective is the ability to maintain effective communication with English native-speakers
(i.e. no mention of ELF-users). It was this shortfall in interculturally-oriented English learning opportunities that prompted our curriculum enrichment project, the design of which was
framed by the considerations discussed below.
Project design considerations
Cultural awareness possibilities
Our pilot project sought to enrich the existing provision through the extracurricular development of an intercultural approach coherent with ELF curricular aims. This development
represents a shift from societally-based awareness of target and home cultures (the default
understanding in much foreign language education thinking) to general awareness of cultural variation that our students might experience through their ELF-based intercultural
encounters. We term the latter type general culture awareness (GCA) and our GCA objective was to enable each student, in a spirit of non-judgemental openness and curiosity to
start developing the habit of anticipat[ing] both expected and unexpected similarities and
differences (in cultural values, beliefs, practices, activities, products and so on) in encounters with individuals with signicantly differing cultural backgrounds (Trejo 2010: 31).
Given the pilot status of the project, plus the lower-intermediate level of the students,
the phrase to start developing was used intentionally. Further, the students English

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language learning takes place in a Spanish-speaking, Mexican EFL context, i.e. without an
immediate source of intercultural experiences on which to base this GCA development. In
some contexts, but not ours, this challenge can be addressed through exchange and/or telecollaborative (see below) experiences of intercultural interactions. Instead, our students
intercultural engagement was through intracultural means, i.e. through their in-group collaboration on materials raising intercultural issues.
This was a cognitive (rather than experiential) approach to intercultural learning but it
was one which rejected the transmission of cultural information associated with the university model (Bhawuk 1990; Brislin, Landis and Brandt 1983) of intercultural training.
Instead, we wanted students to engage (through reection and discussion from multi-perspectives) with intercultural stimuli. This approach can be linked with intellectual
empathy, i.e. a trait of mind necessary to fair-mindedness involving the awareness of
the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others so as to genuinely understand
them (Paul and Elder 2002: 26). Such an approach can also be understood in terms of
changes in habits of mind (Mezirow 2000: 17), i.e. the broad generalized, orienting predispositions that act as a lter for interpreting the meaning of experience, e.g. ethnocentrism. The approach in our project sought to contribute to the students beginning to develop a
more intercultural (rather than ethnocentric) habit of mind.
Critical incident possibilities
The project was based on our students intracultural engagement (individual and collaborative) with critical incidents (CIs), a cognitively-oriented technique widely used in the eld
of intercultural training (e.g. Cushner and Brislin 1996; Dant 1995; Wight 1995) and in education more generally (e.g. Council of Europe undated; Jackson 2002). Notwithstanding the
critiques of their essentialist potential (Guest 2002) i.e. with characters reduced to reductive understandings of the nationally-dened culture to which they are ascribed with care,
reconstructed intercultural encounters (Holliday 2004) can be used as a cognitive stimulus
for our ELF-related learning objective.
CIs present intercultural encounters in which effective communication is undermined
by misunderstandings resulting from the participants ethnocentric habit of mind as they
interpret the values and behaviours of others. Having read and discussed a brief account
of such a problematic encounter, students discuss a range of plausible explanations for
the miscommunication in the encounter and in this way they are encouraged to develop
the habit of isomorphic attribution, i.e. the habit of considering different meanings for
the same phenomenon (Bhawuk 2001: 143). Typically, the range of plausible explanations
is provided by the CI developer but, as we wanted to inculcate a sense of creative curiosity
about Otherness and to challenge the essentialist potential (which could be reinforced by
providing the right cultural answers), we encouraged students to develop what they considered to be plausible explanations for the miscommunication.
Technology-based possibilities
In recent times, the use of technology for cultural and intercultural projects in foreign
language education has been most evident in telecollaboration projects (e.g. Belz and
Thorne 2006; Dooly and ODowd 2012; Warschauer 1996) in which, typically, students
communicate online using their foreign language with native-speakers of that language.
This is often set up reciprocally. One common objective is students development of
their (context-specic) cultural awareness regarding the societies with which their overseas

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partners are identied and with which the foreign language they are learning is commonly
associated; this objective resonates with an EFL rather than the ELF orientation.
In our context, although curricular constraints made a telecollaboration project unfeasible, we did recognise that a technology-aided project might suit the extracurricular nature of
the project as well as our students deep-rooted interest in new technologies. We therefore
decided to build the project around the collaborative meaning-making possibilities of a
wiki. In brief, wikis are a Web 2.0 tool characterised by continually-modiable, easy-toaccess, loosely-structured webpages that can be linked to each other as well as to other
Internet resources. These characteristics enable users to visit, read, edit, reorganise and
update the structure and content (text and pictures) of the page(s) as they see t (Leuf
and Cunningham 2001). For our purposes, wikis enable collaboration by students as they
disseminate information and exchange and discuss ideas (Ebersbach, Glaser and Heigl
2005: 2). Students can also easily edit the pages to reect the shared knowledge of the
learning group (Augar, Raitman and Zhou 2004: 2) as it develops through the groups
online interactions.
The project
Bringing these contextual and design considerations together so as to enable students to
begin developing their GCA, we developed a wiki-based, CI-driven pilot project for a
group of 14 students on the international business and commercial trade programmes.
These students aged 1922 and broadly balanced in terms of gender were taking
lower-intermediate EFL classes in the language centre. Students were grouped in
three trios and two pairs and they took part in the pilot project without direct reference
to their regular English classes. The project was organised in three main phases: (1) a
face-to-face introduction to the wiki and how to use it (necessary as this was a new technology for them); (2) wiki-based introductions by the members of each of the ve
groups (as they had not necessarily met before); and (3) a set of CI-based project
activities.
For Phase 3, each group was given an English-medium CI (taken from Cushner and
Brislin 1996, slightly modied to better match the students level in English). Each
group received a different CI so that, given the limited time available, intragroup discussions of one CI could then, through intergroup discussion, be enriched with exposure to
a variety of CIs and the intercultural issues embedded in them. The set of ve CIs, were
chosen to provide a range of communication challenges and a diverse set of individuals
engaged in intercultural encounters; they included a French doctor working in Saudi
Arabia and a British man dating an Iranian woman. Each CI involved characters ascribed
to particular national-cultural backgrounds but no incident involved anyone from Mexico
and anglophone cultures were not especially prioritised. The choice of incidents with
such cultural ascriptions was made partly because, with the exception of Holliday, Hyde
and Kullman (2004), it is difcult to source incidents narrating culturally-complex individuals encounters with different kinds of otherness and partly because, for better or worse,
such national anchors of cultural identity are a key component of the complex culturality of
self- and other- ascriptions of identity.
Each small group of students followed a series of seven wiki-based activities to collaboratively discuss their CI in English. The activities encouraged them to develop, share and
discuss possible interpretations of the miscommunication in the CIs and to do so in a spirit
of curiosity (rather than work towards either the correct answer or simply articulate their
own response to the CI). Thus, we hoped that the activities might help them to begin

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developing the habit (of mind) of approaching such incidents with an openness towards cultural variation. The seven activities were as follows:
(1) Each student read individually the CI for their group, noted their initial reaction to it
and then used their group wiki-page to post their initial response. They also, in the
spirit of curiosity that we encouraged, included their speculations about other possible interpretations. Through this rst activity, each student was exposed to the
responses of the others in their group. This led to some group discussion of the perceived explanatory power of the different possibilities.
(2) Building on this discussion, each group brainstormed topics to research which
might help them develop more informed interpretative responses to their particular
CI. For example, one group suggested exploring (in their own words) marriage in
Iran, the relation between marriage and religion and the habits of Iran.
(3) Each student then undertook an agreed part of this research agenda. Although they
were free to consult resources in Spanish, they almost exclusively used Englishmedium web resources and then posted the resulting insights onto their groups
wiki page. As before, individual work was thus enriched by exposure to the
work of others. They then used the new insights to revisit their initial responses
to the CI, leading to a further round of discussion of their collectively-informed
interpretive possibilities.
(4) At this point, each group received the published explanatory possibilities accompanying their CI. We took care not to devalue their developing suggestions with these
further perspectives and, in practice, students did not view them as authoritative
interpretations but rather as possibilities which often resonated with those they
had already created.
(5) The project now moved from work within groups to a sharing of ideas between
groups. Each group invited the other groups to engage with their CI via their
wikis, and in this way, all students encountered the full set of CIs. The wiki was
the main medium of communication between individual students as well as
between groups as the project was essentially extracurricular. The wiki successfully
facilitated discussion and made each teams ndings accessible to the rest of the
teams. Encouraged by the process of developing plausible explanations for their
own CI, the students offered responses on the CIs they had just newly encountered,
in this way further maintaining the spirit of curious engagement with intercultural
encounters experienced vicariously through the CIs. The ensuing discussions
involved the members of each group sharing the fruits of their research with the
other students. In this way, the other students could eavesdrop on the developing
thinking of the other groups as they engaged with the new CIs.
(6) Each group then consolidated (through a presentation for the other groups) their
thinking about their interpretative response(s) to the CI.
(7) Finally, all students explored how the issues raised in each CI might play out in a
Mexican context. For example, with regard to intercultural dating and, for them,
the largely unfamiliar topic of arranged marriage, they noted how in Mexico the
act of a girl introducing her boyfriend to her parents may not, in itself, have any
connotations of marriage. Here, their response involved noting similarities
between their Mexican context and the Western character in the CI concerned.
However, in another CI (involving Japanese and US characters), their Mexican perspective was closer to the Eastern rather than Western perspective in the CI. In this
way, this nal stage began challenging monolithic interpretative stances such as

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those based on EasternWestern, developeddeveloping and Christian
Muslim binaries.

Evidence of students intercultural learning

Data used to evaluate possible learning through the project
In tandem with the development and implementation of the pilot project, we used three data
sets to evaluate the students development (if any) of GCA during the project, as shown in
Table 1.
We examined each data set in turn, looking for evidence (or lack thereof) showing students: (a) curiosity vis--vis (the possible causes of miscommunication in) the intercultural
encounters; (b) openness to different interpretative possibilities for these miscommunications (rather than a reliance on their initial reactions or authoritative, correct explanations);
and (c) a developing habit of anticipating both expected and unexpected cultural similarities
and differences. We then used the case study of Pablo, one of the students that we interviewed, to exemplify the kinds of insight arising from this analysis.

Prior cultural experience

At the start of the project, we used a questionnaire to ask students about their previous
encounters with people from different cultural backgrounds and about their motivation to
have such encounters. Although most of them reported some intercultural experience, typically this consisted of occasional, brief encounters (e.g. asking for directions and ordering
food when travelling). More frequent opportunities for learning about different cultures
came through lms and television. The students all seemed keen to talk with people
from other parts of the world, but they felt that it might be difcult for them to successfully
adapt to cultural differences. Here, despite their largely monocultural experience base, we
can see their curiosity about, and openness to, otherness. We can also see their not unreasonable appraisal of how challenging they might nd intercultural experience.
Wiki-based engagement with the CIs
The project generated ve group wiki-pages and ve further pages where each group posted
their work for the whole class. In general, these pages consisted of short, English-medium
contributions. It is clear from the way these are formulated that later contributions were a
response to, or were informed by, earlier contributions. There was some evidence of the students using the wikis self-editing facility to modify their contributions over time, but, in
Table 1. Project data corpus.
Data set

Objective

[1] 14 English-medium responses to 12-item initial

questionnaire for each student.
[2] 10 English-medium project wiki-pages created
by all teams.
[3] Three Spanish-medium stimulated-recall
interviews with the three of the students only.

To gauge the extent of students cultural

experiences at the start of the project.
To observe students responses to the activities
based on the CIs.
To hear their evaluations of the project
experiences and what they learned from
them.

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general, students expressed their thoughts without being preoccupied with linguistic accuracy. For example, as an initial response to a CI set in a Japanese educational context, one
student wrote: I was thinking about that it could be interesting to search information about
what does bento means. What is normal to eat of lunch at school in Japan? Longer, more
linguistically-accurate, postings appeared when the students quoted from, and commented
on, explanatory chunks from English-medium websites they had consulted during the
research stage of the project.
The most striking feature for us in these wiki-page contributions is the sustained, high
levels of curiosity from most students about the CI content and their continued openness
to a range of plausible explanatory possibilities. Very few of them wanted there to be a
correct answer and most changed their views several times during the activities. A
typical example of how they voiced their curiosity is as follows: also I want to
know what does bento means, because knowing this information can be one of the
main parts of this incident. And its interesting to know what the food is like in
Japan. They considered a range of possibilities (self-generated, raised by their colleagues,
provided by the CI developers and developed through research). For example, one student
wrote this about her interpretations of the groups CI: I think that our case is interesting
but the same time its a situation uncommon and there are many possibilities to understand it.
Retrospective insights
For the stimulated-recall interviews (Polio, Gass and Chapin 2006), we asked three students to use their own teams wiki pages as stimuli to articulate their retrospective views
on the project experiences. These three students were selected from the larger group on
the basis of our evaluation of their high levels of engagement during the project. We
are aware, therefore, that the evidence from these interviews does not necessarily
typify the group but rather exemplies the views of motivated participants. Overall, the
students retrospections in the interviews eshed out for us our wiki-based impressions
of their project experiences and what they gained from them. This can be seen most
clearly through individual cases (see Pablos case study below). This evaluation activity
mixed the English of wiki-page stimuli and the Spanish of the recalls. We analysed the
data in the original language but, in this article, we have translated all quotations from
the interview data.
The interviewees made similar comments about their developing openness to other perspectives, of which the following are examples:
[the project] helped open my eyes, it helped me to say, of a Jewish person for example, just
because his ideas are different to mine I will not [refuse to] talk to him I think this
project helped me not to be closed-minded and not to say I wont talk to this person just
because we dont think the same. (Mariana)
The CI made me explore different possibilities, then after exploring them I felt more condent
as I had conrmed my hunches and discovered new things. (Pablo)

Resonant with the projects interculturally-oriented ELF stance, such statements also
suggest that the students are open to otherness beyond the anglophone world. Their openness is tied to their curiosity: I found it very interesting to explore the people in Iran
because there were many things that I did not know and those things are important for
them (Pablo). We also found evidence of their developing habit of anticipating expected
and unexpected cultural similarities and differences:

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I am studying International Business and I am aware now that it will be different to negotiate
with a Korean than with Japanese. Therefore, I must, analyse and reect about what you should
do and how to adapt but more importantly what not to do when interacting with a person with a
different culture. (Mariana)

Pablos case study

A 20-year-old native of Mexico City and a student of international business, Pablo had
limited prior intercultural experiences but he did have friends in the Mexican diaspora
living in the US. His group worked on the previously mentioned CI involving a British
man dating an Iranian woman and the miscommunication occurring when he met her
father. In his initial, and typically ethnocentric, reaction, he notes how some cultures
have some strange manners which for us could be unusual and also could be a little
crazy. In a display suggestive of intellectual empathy, he tries to imagine what for the
Iranian people [ ] this kind of relationship with somebody means and his guess is
that the problems revolve around formality in dating etiquette and the signicance of
meeting the father: maybe when the boyfriend go to the house of the girl her
father thought what he went to have a formal courtship.
During the research stage, Pablo and his colleagues explored Iranian culture and its perspectives on religion and marriage. As a result, he ne-tuned his initial response to the CI:
Now [it] is a little more easy to have an idea about the problem and I could realize that the
problem were the differences between both cultures because they have variability in the behaviors and beliefs and I consider the father notices they commencing to do things [t]hat only are
permitted when somebody is married and for this reason he could thought they going to be
married as soon as they can but when he listen Scott said that he didnt have plan[s] to get
married he must have felt offended.

However, as he further engages with the ideas of his colleagues and those of the CI developers, he retains an open mind: I consider could be two possibilities and I dont know
which to choose .. Finally, when asked to imagine how the situation might play out
in Mexico, he notes that If this happen[s] in Mexico its going to be normal, because
here the people used to go out, know the person and after take a decision about what
will happen between the person who you met and you.
As he reected on the experience, embedded in his positive comments about the project
experience of using a wiki for such extracurricular activities, Pablo had many interesting
things to say relevant to our concern with the projects GCA potential. He found it
really interesting to explore about the people in Iran because there were many things that
I did not know and those things are very important for them, explorations which have
made him realise that, if at some point I went there, without knowing all this, it would
have caused me so many problems and it would be very difcult for me.
Reecting on the different perspectives on personal relationships in Mexico and Iran, he
remarks that I think we are a lot more open but immediately qualies this by saying it is
not that I am questioning their differences because at the end we are all different. He tries to
articulate the balance between his comfort in the ways of being he is used to and his openness to the value (for others) of doing things differently: to me [the Iranian way] wasnt
strange but different personally I think that their religion prohibits them things that for
me would be very necessary to develop as an individual and to mature. This internal balancing has to be accompanied also by a sense of the challenges of managing intercultural
encounters: its natural that there will be differences and if I am not aware of the others

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culture, I may do something that will offend the other and that may cause me problems and
it may not be my intention . The project has helped in this regard as he is now more
aware that things are not the same everywhere and that interactions with people from
different cultures are complicated, so before I say or do something I know that I have to
do some research to avoid misunderstandings.
By the end, in his own way, he notes the importance of what we would describe as
anticipating both unexpected and expected areas of similarity and difference: I became
aware of the different cultures and the problems that can be originated from not knowing
something about others culture.

Concluding comments
In this article, we have reected on and evaluated a wiki-enabled, CI-based, GCA-developing,
extracurricular pilot project to consider how we might implement the intercultural turn in the
largely monocultural EFL setting in a Mexican university. In this TESOL setting, classroomrelated opportunities for intercultural interaction are limited both in terms of curriculum
space and encouragement for a more ELF intercultural (as opposed to EFL/cultural) approach.
In our discussion above, we provided a sketch of the project and its GCA rationale. Given the
pilot status of the project and the students relatively low levels of English and limited day-today possibilities for intercultural encounters, the project involved modest objectives, i.e. that
students might begin developing a new habit of mind when encountering otherness, one in
which curiosity and openness are central. In keeping with the culture-general rather culturespecic orientation of our understanding of GCA, we hoped that students might also come to
anticipate cultural variation in general and bring their curiosity to bear when they encounter it.
As seen in the discussion of the three data sets and through Pablos case, there was some
evidence to suggest that these modest objectives were attainable through the project activity
in this setting. It is a setting whose roots which lie in the expanding circle of EFL are
being challenged by the intercultural turn in TESOL. Thus, the project provides an indication of how the existing EFL/cultural orientation might be enriched to embrace the challenges of the intercultural turn. We hope that this discussion may, in some respects, resonate
with language teachers in other contexts, especially those operating in what might be
termed a post-TEFL paradigm. The international lingua franca role and function of
English perhaps raises different challenges than for other foreign languages and perhaps
the intercultural turn will mean different things in these differing language specialisms.
For us, the key for TESOL seems to lie in providing often as enabled through technology
opportunities for students to develop GCA to support their intercultural encounters
through English which we envisage they will use internationally (rather than foreignly)
and interculturally (rather than culture-specically) in the future.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Diane Slaouti, for her supervisory support during the project and to colleagues in the
Language Teacher Education group at Manchester (Susan Brown, Gary Motteram, Juup Stelma and
Zeynep Onat-Stelma) for their critical reading of early drafts of this article.

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