Introduction

Learners' relationship to the target language is complexified when they have opportunities to use it as a tool for constructing and interpreting interactional encounters outside the classroom. Whereas examination of language use in conversational transcripts or textbook dialogues allows learners to practice interpretation from a distanced perspective, the experience of observing and using the language outside the classroom brings to the learner a different kind of cognitive and affective stimulation, as well as different insights drawn from the experience (Roberts et al., 2001). Similarly, learners' accumulation of experience of using their L1 in a range of contexts brings to them a stock of normative expectations and other assumptions for interpreting social behaviour and negotiating meanings in a range of contexts with a variety of interlocutors. As discussed in Chapter 2, the interpretation of interactional experience, whether in the L1 or L2, is necessarily filtered through a learner's existing interpretive architecture – the complexly interwoven amalgam of cultural assumptions, explicit knowledge, schema, scripts and stereotypes. Throughout the language learning experience, learners draw on and add to their interpretive architecture not only by acquiring new linguistic knowledge but also by adding new socio-cultural knowledge and using reflection to modify and reorganize existing knowledge (Kecskes, 2014). Each experience of interaction also draws on and feeds back into the interpretive architecture, with the potential to bring about meaningful insights, depending on the nature of the reflective engagement with the experience and level of significance imbued to the experience. It is the recognition of this importance of analyzing and reflecting on experience that underlies much of the work on critical incidents in the intercultural field (e.g. Snow, 2015; Spencer-Oatey, 2013), as well as more recent work on the autobiography of intercultural encounters (Byram et al., 2009) and learning within the context of study abroad (Holmes et al., 2016).