Cross-cultural skills - crossing the disciplinary divide

Courses in cross-cultural communication and in “foreign” languages, in Australian universities at least, often fail to communicate across institutional and disciplinary barriers. Starting from an analysis of two courses in intercultural communication, this paper examines how they foreground cultural difference and where they locate it in relation to the classroom. This analysis raises a number of issues of relevance to the teaching of culture within “language courses.” The affordances of this interdisciplinary approach are explored with particular reference to the teaching of French.