Intercultural sensitivity: A study of pre-service english language teachers

Abstract

Since societies develop mutual aims and different societies perpetuate developing long-term economic, social and cultural relationships with other cultural groups and the global instability continues hitting the world, developing intercultural sensitivity becomes more and more important at all levels of the education, especially for those who will teach other languages. One of the major aspects of intercultural communication competence is intercultural sensitivity which has been gaining increasing attention in different disciplines. This paper focuses on the importance of intercultural sensitivity and shares the results of a study on the intercultural sensitivity of Turkish ELT major (English Language Teaching) pre-service teachers. For this purpose, 70 senior ELT major pre-service teachers completed an instrument comprising 5 factors with 24 items developed by Chen and Starosta (2000) for measuring intercultural sensitivity.