Abstract:
AbstractThe current study attempted to cast light on the status quo of Iranian EFL teachers'perceptions of ICC. It further attempted to see if their experience would influence their conceptualizations of ICC. To this end, a total of 100 EFL teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire survey adapted from Han & Song's (2011) study. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed a number of commonalities and discrepancies among the participants' conceptualizations of International Communication Competence (ICC) and its relevance to ELT considering their teaching experience. The findings point to the prominence of intercultural teacher education in the Iranian context.
Machine summary:
"Keywords: English Language Teachers' Perceptions, Foreign Language Education, Globalization, Intercultural Communicative Competence, Teaching Experience Introduction Globalization as "the multidimensional social processes that intensify worldwide social interdependencies" (Stager, 2003, cited in Kheng&Baldauf, 2011, p.
As a result, recognition has been increasing of the significance role of cultural dimension in foreign language education (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004) and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) came under the spotlight as a crucial component in language learning and teaching (Byram&Zarate, 1997).
Nevertheless, ICC is not an "automatic" consequence of foreign language teaching (Meyer, 1991) and English teachers play a pivotal role in orienting foreign language teaching toward the intercultural education particularly in non-English speaking countries (Han & Song, 2011).
Despite the recent growing interest in culture teaching (Corbett, 2003), ICC is still given a marginal part in foreign language education (Lange & Paige, 2003).
As it included both closed- and open- ended questions, it lent itself to both quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to elicit the teachers' perceptions of intercultural dimension of English language teaching in Iranian EFL context in general and in terms of their teaching experience in particular.
Regardless of their teaching experience, the teachers shared the same opinion considering what FLE can do to increase chances of including cultural dimensions in Iranian EFL context.
On the other hand, almost all less experienced teachers agreed to some extent that English/foreign language teaching should enhance students’ understanding of their own cultural identities (M= 3."