Building on research on identity (e.g., Norton, 2013), intercultural communicative competence (e.g., Byram, 2008) and English as a lingua franca (e.g., Dewey, 2012), this article examines how the notion of a global citizen was constructed in a school-based ethnographic study involving students from Asia who were recipients of a Singapore government scholarship. Identity construction in this English-medium school was traced across four levels — national, school, classroom, and group interactions — in order to analyze the ways in which global citizenship was realized. Findings from the multiple data sets revealed that while a skewed interpretation of the global citizen was conceived at the school and classroom level, group interactions among students yielded promising indicators of how intercultural communication as mediated through English as a lingua franca could help produce students who are open minded and work actively to build relationships with others. The article closes with a discussion of possibilities for designing pedagogy to develop global citizenship education.
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