In this article we depart from a conceptualisation of foreign language teaching as intercultural citizenship in schools and universities. We extend this conceptualisation by suggesting that foreign language teaching can and should also sensitise students about issues of human suffering and cultivate empathy, solidarity, hospitality and inclusion. In this way language education can create spaces for fostering political, ethical, and social justice responsibilities for changing socially unjust societies. We show how this suggestion was enacted in a higher education setting in Argentina with student teachers and student translators of English using pedagogies of discomfort and pedagogies of empathy and solidarity to deal with difficult issues through arts and literature.

This article describes an online intercultural citizenship project concerning the environment in the primary English-language classroom carried out in 2013/2014 between Argentina and Denmark. It is part of a network of projects coordinated by Michael Byram that involves teachers and researchers in Europe, the US and East Asia. The project is framed within the theory of intercultural citizenship in the foreign-language classroom and it is the only study set in the primary school context. Furthermore, developments in Latin America in this field are scarce and the study intends to fill an empirical gap. Although the comparative perspective is ingrained in the project, the article describes mainly the Argentinian standpoint. At the same time, and more generally (beyond language education), it will be argued, and shown, that the project can also be framed within the notion of ecological citizenship, understood as a new form of citizenship that presents new challenges to educators. While the notion of citizenship in formal education usually assumes nationalist and patriotic mindsets, in this project ecological citizenship offers a new framework that introduces an international, transnational or global perspective. Furthermore, citizenship education tends to be reserved to secondary civics and social studies classrooms and in this sense the focus on the primary school context and on the foreign-language classroom is innovative in this project.

In this article I argue that the theory of intercultural citizenship in language education developed by Michael Byram can contribute to broadening CLIL’s theoretical outlook and pedagogy – two needs for CLIL identified in the literature. I do so by showing that Coyle’s 4Cs framework and Marsh, Maljers and Hartiala’s five dimensions of CLIL coincide with the point of departure of intercultural citizenship theory, which is the notion of intercultural communicative competence. I argue that intercultural citizenship can inform CLIL in theoretical terms as it bridges the 4Cs framework with the recent pluriliteracies CLIL model proposed by Meyer, Coyle, Halbach, Schuck and Ting. It can also inform CLIL pedagogically because it is a recent curricular development that has been tested empirically in language classrooms in 11 countries. Finally, I illustrate my argument with a case study of intercultural citizenship-based CLIL about the Malvinas war carried out in Argentina and Britain in 2012 in the foreign language classroom in higher education, in a type B CLIL language course.

In this article we review research on English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning published in Argentina between 2007 and 2013. This is the first review of a Latin American country in this series. Argentina has a century-long tradition of training EFL teachers but a comparatively shorter though fruitful history of foreign language (FL) research. The article examines 88 articles that appeared in locally published peer-reviewed conference proceedings, academic journals and one edited collection. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of topics that illustrates prominent research interests in the country, such as the role of imagination, emotion and affect in language comprehension and production, intercultural dimensions, FL teacher education and development, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), computer-assisted language learning (CALL), the teaching of English for academic or specific purposes, testing, assessment and evaluation, and materials design and course development. The review includes work by specialists whose research may not be known outside the boundaries of Argentina but who produce high-quality situated research that accounts for the specificity of the local educational setting.