This chapter reviews the role of intercultural language education in empowering the English language teacher in a multipolar environment, as we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century. It situates intercultural language education within a continuum of cognitive to social and critical approaches to language learning and considers how recent and current national and multinational curricular documents serve to support, or constrain, the individual teacher’s educational agenda. The nature of interculturality in ELT is addressed, as are differing models of intercultural communicative competence. The chapter addresses the different components of the intercultural language task with a specific focus on the roles of the teacher and learner in the intercultural classroom.