Integrating Intercultural Communicative Competence into Teacher Education for Young Learners

Abstract

Interaction, communication, and cooperation among different cultures are no longer optional skills but must competencies for professional contexts all around the globe in the 21st century. As English is the medium of professional encounters in today’s world, foreign language teaching is responsible for developing these competencies from the early years of education. This results in culture being an important component of foreign language classes, which puts a heavy responsibility on teachers’ shoulders. Although they may show a sincere effort to integrate culture into lessons, their attempt mostly stays at a basic level focusing on superficial information shared in the language teaching coursebooks published by the global or local publishers. Thus, integrating culture and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) into foreign language teaching needs to be addressed in pre-service teacher education. This paper reports an action research study where a teacher educator investigates her own practice in integrating ICC into a pre-service teacher education session on teaching English to young learners. Thus, the study aims to explain how effective a training session can be in achieving its ICC goals and discover what teacher candidates think about integrating culture and ICC into foreign language teaching based on their training session experience.