Interpretive Accountability in University English Education Integrating Intercultural Inquiry and Mediation

Abstract

How can teachers connect intercultural interpretation with communicative decisions and assess the relationship? This critical conceptual review specifies interpretive accountability as a task-design principle for university English education. A purposive synthesis connects intercultural communicative competence, situated understandings of culture, intercultural pragmatics, mediation and assessment. The proposal traces contextual evidence through communicative choice to consequential meaning and a bounded assessment judgement. Its contribution is an inspectable arrangement of established concerns rather than an independent competence construct. Two constructed tasks within a proposed university academic communication workshop examine procedural explanation and reasoned disagreement. Contrasting response profiles show why meaning preservation and audience adaptation require separate feedback. A five-activity sequence is accompanied by a proposed 100-minute implementation plan, while a teacher calibration protocol specifies how descriptor usability and disagreement could be investigated. No learner or teacher data are reported, and neither descriptor separability nor instructional effectiveness has been established. The framework offers a bounded specification for formative task design and identifies the evidence needed to evaluate its practical value.