PARDON, YOU SHOULD” — BEING POLITE ACROSS CULTURES Alcina Maria Pereira de Sousa University of Madeira, Arts and Humanities Centre Campus da Penteada, 9000—390 Funchal, Portugal Drawing on an empirical study undertaken in 1998—9 and 2008, this paper suggests a renewed and refreshing view (Micklos 2001: 5) on an ever-problem posing issue as is the role of modality in communicative and intercultural competence. <...> In fact, this diachronic case study aims at reassessing some evidence on EFL learners’/undergraduates’ reading habits in a FL context, grounded on empirical research undertaken in Madeira Island in 1998—1999 compared with data collected in 2008. <...> The former involved a representative number of informants: 12th form Humanities students (n = 197) and first- and second-year undergraduates (n = 57) taking English — Joint Honours — at the University of Madeira. <...> Their response to a questionnaire on reading habits, purposes, strategies and text types in English as a foreign language, has offered renewed insights on a changing trend in the use of modals by EFL undergraduates for global communication. <...> The analysis of respondents’ use of modals (1998/9—2008) unearths a shifting cline from the use of “must” to “should”. <...> In this paper it is thus argued that fostering speakers’ linguistic and discursive awareness with an emphasis on the grammatical, pragmatic and semantic levels, contrastively, contributes to speakers’ awareness of specificities of both their mother tongue and foreign/additional language in a dialogic and dynamic way. <...> Introduction In the twenty-first century, we have observed a renewed interest in understanding the role of the pedagogical context, especially in the teaching/learning of a foreign/ additional language, concerning the development of communicative and intercultural competence towards multicultural literacy. <...> This is highlighted by the wide number of publications in the area (cf. <...> Byram and Grundy, 2003) and reflected, for instance, in the “Common European Framework of Reference: Learning, Teaching, Assessment” (official document issued by The European Council). <...> In so doing, many scholars claim that teaching/learning foreign/additional languages and their cultures ought to be interpreted not as “the other” but, learning another linguistic code implies the interaction with another worldview and culture perceived dialogically from the one in one’s mother tongue. <...> At the macro-level, the foreign language learner / speaker, also called “an intercultural speaker” (Morgan <...>