“Our culture will not really allow that”: Rethinking criticality in academic writing from an intercultural perspective

Abstract

This study investigates how criticality, a central concept in academic writing, is understood and negotiated in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom within an intercultural and multilingual Indonesian context. Drawing on an intercultural language teaching and learning (ILTL) framework, the study conceptualises criticality not as a fixed set of textual or cognitive skills, but as an intercultural and relational process of meaning-making. Using a qualitative, interpretivist design, data were collected from classroom interaction, including teacher-student dialogue, and analysed thematically across textual, interpersonal, and epistemological dimensions. The findings show that while criticality is introduced as a structured academic practice aligned with dominant Anglophone conventions, students interpret and enact it through culturally shaped practices such as indirectness, relational sensitivity, and mitigation. Classroom interaction reveals that within an ILTL perspective, criticality is realised through the intercultural processes of noticing, comparing, reflecting, and negotiating meaning, rather than through adherence to fixed academic conventions. At the same time, tensions persist between global academic expectations and students' existing cultural frameworks. The study argues that understanding criticality requires attention to these intercultural processes and highlights the need to reconsider how academic writing is taught in multilingual contexts. Future research should examine how such understandings are realised in students' written texts to provide a more comprehensive account of criticality in practice.