Recently, classroom-based foreign language learning, particularly as practiced in Europe, has begun moving from a focus on teaching for communicative competence to teaching for intercultural communicative competence. Like communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence includes the knowledge and abilities needed to participate in communicative activities in which the target language is the primary communicative code and in situations where it is the common code for those with different preferred languages. It also includes cognitive and affective skills and behaviors needed to engage in unfamiliar encounters with culturally different interlocutors, to negotiate one's cultural identities in light of one's roles in these encounters, and to understand the norms and assumptions underlying the various communicative activities on one's own terms.