The development of intercultural competence is a highly complex process. One crucial step to it is the development of an awareness that the own norms for producing and interpreting communicative patterns are culturally determined (cf. e.g. Allwood 1982). It is necessary to learn not to automatically apply one’s own norms to the culture of the other. This is the condition of the ability to acquire important competences such as tolerance to situational ambiguity, faculty of accommodation, empathy, or distance to one’s own role, which are considered to be essential for intercultural competence (cf. e.g. Bolten 2001).

While the analysis of transcriptions of intercultural interaction is an approved method in intercultural communication trainings (cf. e.g. ten Thije 1999), the aim of this paper is to show the potential of cross-cultural analysis of conversation transcriptions, particularly in an earlier stage of language learning. This is important especially in order to develop an intercultural competence which is not perceived by the learner as the acquisition of a recipe knowledge.