"Classroom Interactions as Cross-Cultural Encounters" is about "native" English speakers teaching English as a global language in non-English speaking countries. Through analysis of naturally occurring dialogic encounters, the authors examine the multifaceted ways in which teachers and students utilize diverse communicative resources to construct, display, and negotiate their identities as teachers, learners, and language users, with different pedagogic, institutional, social, and political implications. A range of issues in applied linguistics is addressed, including linguistic imperialism, post-colonial theories, micropolitics of classroom interaction, language and identity, and bilingual classroom practices. The context of the classroom data analyzed is post-colonial Hong Kong. The data are from an ethnographic study in Hong Kong secondary schools from 1998-2000 involving four native English-speaker teachers and two bilingual Cantonese-English speaking teachers engaged in intercultural classroom dialogues with their Cantonese Hong Kong students. This book is intended to help TESOL professionals of different cultural backgrounds, working in different sociocultural contexts, to critically understand how non-assimilationist, dialogic intercultultural communication with students can be achieved and built on for mutual cultural and linguistic enrichment and empowerment.