ELT Scholars’ Attitudes towards Inclusion of Intercultural Competence Assessment in Language Proficiency Tests

Abstract

Intercultural Competence Assessment (ICA) has recently become a central issue in applied linguistics in general, and language testing and assessment in particular. The present paper aims to investigate the difference between native and non-native assessment experts’ beliefs about incorporating ICA in the Language Proficiency Assessment (LPA). Basic qualitative research design was employed and questions were emailed to 97 native and non-native language testing and assessment experts of whom 32 participants returned their responses (response rate = 33%). Moreover, 10 of the experts were interviewed to triangulate the data. The data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The results demonstrated that there were no significant differences between native experts and non-native experts' attitudes towards whether ICA should be included in the LPA. Despite this finding, some native speaker experts strongly disagreed with the notion while some other non-native scholars supported it. This study may be helpful to Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) assessment experts who argue for the inclusion of ICA in the LPA, believing that such an inclusion would benefit not only second language proficiency assessment but also efforts in designing more effective instructional syllabuses.