INTERCULTURAL STATE OF MIND: INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS

Abstract

Teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) are among the instructors responsible for the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in learners. Preparing students to interact in a global, multilingual and multicultural world is not an easy task, as ICC is a complex concept and teachers need both training and instruction to firstly develop it themselves and then apply it in their teaching. The paper explores whether pre-service EFL teachers show an awareness of ICC elements, and whether their ICC and intercultural sensitivity can be seen in their coursework. The qualitative research into final essays of 30 students who attended an elective course Intercultural Communicative Competence, at the University of Niš, from three cohorts (from 2014 to 2017) aims at answering the following questions: what topics the students chose for their final project, what attitudes they showed, whether they knew and used the ICC-related terminology after a semester-long course. Results have shown that the students tended to use topics they feel comfortable with, such as stereotypes; showed a good grasp on the terminology especially in relation to culture models; and showed positive attitudes towards ICC issues, however, mostly remaining in Bennett’s Minimization stage.