The globalisation process created an increasing demand not only in linguistic competen¬ce, but also in intercultural communicative competence. However, what role intercultural competence can assume as an educational objective in schools and universities in general and in foreign language teaching in particular, is not yet evident. This will be investigated within contexts of language pedagogy and educational policy. Intercultural competence can be divided into knowledge, skills and attitudes. It includes the ability:
? to aquire orientational knowledge about foreign cultural standards
? to become aware of one's own cultural perspective
? to coordinate different cultural schemata (perceptual and behavioural)
• to take an other culture's perspective and related to language:
? pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence
? discourse competence
? strategie competence The paper discusses these components in various types of educational settings and points
out the limitations of some approaches that reduce intercultural competence to certain components only.
