From Communicative Competence to Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Retrospect

Abstract

The notion of “Communicative Competence” has often been discussed in view of the challenges that intercultural interactions pose to the notion itself, especially as the notion was originally conceived by abstracting it from multicultural environments. From the 1990s a new idea challenged the notion, which was that any interaction is in some sense an encounter between different cultures and that interaction between speakers coming from different countries is only an extreme condition of this. Thus, the idea of “intercultural communicative competence” has been introduced to complement the idea of communicative competence. The discussion has led to define the concept of “intercultural speaker” as a reference point for a theory of communicative practices in multicultural environments as well as the notion of Intercultural Communicative Competence. The present article presents the debate that starts from the definition of “Communicative Competence” and has brought the field to today’s models of “Intercultural Communicative Competence”.