Intercultural awareness

In the fast-changing modern world of today, learners need global skills for life-long learning and effective communication. Among these skills are intercultural competence and critical thinking. Although teachers have acknowledged the importance of the inclusion of global skills in their actual teaching procedures, they still need more concrete methodology and tangible pedagogical frameworks to incorporate these skills into their teachings. This study has been an attempt to propose a framework based on the constructivist approach to activate critical thinking and, in turn, develop critical cultural awareness and intercultural skills in EFL learners. To achieve this aim, a qualitative study was designed; an intercultural syllabus was developed and implemented through the constructivist approach in an academic semester. The related data were then collected through the participants’ reflective worksheets and interviews. The content analysis of the data indicated that the constructivist approach and the intercultural syllabus were effective in assisting the participants in applying critical thinking strategies and developing critical cultural awareness and intercultural skills of discovery and interaction, interpreting and relating, and evaluation. Meanwhile, the results of the self-report evaluation survey indicated that the participants evaluated most of the aspects of the intercultural experience positively. The findings of the current study have implications for instructors, materials developers, and educational stakeholders who support developing intercultural awareness and skills in learners.

With increasing intercultural communication among people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the integration of language and culture has recently been foregrounded in language education. This has led to a growing need for studies on intercultural communicative competence. To address this need, this study aimed to afford an insight into the beliefs of 20 Iranian language teachers on intercultural language teaching (ICLT). Based on a mixed-method design, two different instruments were used to collect the data. First, an ICLT questionnaire which included 12 items was administered to 20 teachers. This study also used semi-structured interviews to obtain an in-depth understanding of the EFL teachers’ attitudes toward ICLT. The findings from the questionnaire revealed that the teachers were favorably disposed toward ICLT and thought that culture teaching is as important as language teaching. They believed that language teachers are required to inform the learners of intercultural issues. Also, the thematic content analysis of the interviews led to the discovery of four main themes, namely definition of culture, ICLT and its significance, challenges in ICLT, and sources used by the teachers to improve their intercultural knowledge. However, many teachers’ responses in the interviews indicated some degree of uncertainty regarding the concept of ICLT, as they were not confident how to integrate language and culture or how to deal with challenges in implementation of ICLT. These findings imply as the teachers’ perceptions would guide their practices in the classroom, more attention needs to be devoted to the inclusion of ICLT-related topics in language teacher education courses to equip the teachers with requisite skills and expertise.