zohreh Hoominian Sharifabad; Ali Mohammad Fazilatfar; Massood null Yazdanimoghaddam
Abstract
Globally occurring changes in an ever-shrinking world acknowledge the goal of making effective communication between people with various cultural backgrounds (East, 2012; Jin, 2014; Kramsh, 2013; Zheng, 2014) and hence the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL context respectively. ...
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Globally occurring changes in an ever-shrinking world acknowledge the goal of making effective communication between people with various cultural backgrounds (East, 2012; Jin, 2014; Kramsh, 2013; Zheng, 2014) and hence the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL context respectively. This longitudinal study based on mixed method sequential design, and random sampling procedure strived to investigate male and female Iranian pre-service teachers' intercultural communicative competence. It also tried to assess the effect of mentor teachers on pre-service teachers' ICC and to see how and to what extent those perceptions are reflected in their classroom practices. This investigation was done in two academic semesters with participation of 49 pre-service teachers (M= 29, F=20) who were in their last year of their teacher education program in Farhangian university of Esfahan, one of the biggest teacher training centers in Iran. the second group of the participants was four mentor teachers (M=2, F=2).Results revealed that the first group of participants achieved an acceptable level of ICC, with higher mean scores in the attitude dimensions and lower levels in skill and knowledge components respectively. The results also indicated negative correlation between the attitudes and skill components of mentor teachers and pre- service teachers. The results of triangulation indicated an apparent disparity between teachers’ ICC perception and practice.
Monir Ghasemi Mighani; Massood Yazdanimoghaddam; Ahmad Mohseni
Abstract
Developing intercultural communicative competence in EFL learners is one of the most recent aspects of language competency that aims at equipping learners with appropriate attitudes and skills to be able to interact more effectively in culturally-diverse settings. The current study was an attempt to ...
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Developing intercultural communicative competence in EFL learners is one of the most recent aspects of language competency that aims at equipping learners with appropriate attitudes and skills to be able to interact more effectively in culturally-diverse settings. The current study was an attempt to explore the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) of a group of English majors and investigate what aspects of ICC explicit teaching could improve.Thus, an intercultural course was designed and implemented through an academic semester. A questionnaire of intercultural communicative competence was administered before and at the end of the semester to find out any possible significant change in the ICC level of the participants. The study also explored if there was any correlation between language proficiency of the participants and their level of ICC. The results of the study indicated that the overall ICC level of the learners increased significantly through the intervention of the intercultural course with the most significant rise in behavioral, cognitive and affective dimensions of the construct respectively. The results showed that there was not any significant correlation between language proficiency and the overall level of intercultural communicative competence; however, regarding the components of ICC some differences were found across two groups. The results of the study have implications in teacher education programs, teaching methodology, curriculum and materials development and the assessment of the ICC construct.
